LITERARY SHRINES 



BT DR. WOLFE 
Uniform with this volume 

A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE 

AMONG THE HAUNTS OF SOME FAMOUS BRITISH 
AUTHORS 

Treating descripti'vely and reminhcently of the 
homes and resorts of English nvriters from the 
time of Chaucer to the present, and of the scenes 
commemorated in their ivorks 

262 pages. Illustrated with four 
photogravures, j^i.25 

A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE AND LITERARY SHRINES 

Two volumes in a box, ^^2.50 



LITERARY 
SHRINES 

THE HAUNTS OF SOME 
FAMOUS AMERICAN 
AUTHORS 



;7---^ 

BY THEODORE F.-^WOLFE 
M.D. Ph.D. " 

AUTHOR OF A LITERARY PILGRIMAGE ETC. 




J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 
PHILADELPHIA. MDCCCXCV 




%%a^ 



W i> 



Copyright, 1895, 

BY 

Theodork F. Wolfe. 



Printed by J. B. Lippincott Company, PHiLADELPHrA, U.S.A. 






TO 



MY WIFE, 



MY SYMPATHETIC AND APPRECIATIVE 

COMPANION IN PILGRIMAGES 

TO MANY 

LITERARY SHRINES 

IN THE NEW WORLD AND THE OLD, 

THIS VOLUME 

IS AFFECTIONATELY INSCRIBED. 



PREFACE 



"pOR some years it has been the delightful 
•*• privilege of the writer of the present 
volume to ramble and sojourn in the scenes amid 
w^hich his best-beloved authors erst lived and 
v^rrote. He has made repeated pilgrimages to 
most of the shrines herein described, and has 
been, at one time or another, favored by inter- 
course and correspondence with many of the 
authors adverted to or with their surviving 
friends and neighbors. In the ensuing pages he 
has endeavored to portray these shrines in pen- 
pictures which, it is hoped, may be interesting 
to those who are unable to visit them and help- 
ful and companionable for those who can and 
will. If certain prominent American authors 
receive little more than mention in these pages, 
it is mainly because so few objects and places 
associated with their lives and writings can now 
be indisputably identified : in some instances the 
writer has expended more time upon fruitless 
quests for shrines which proved to be non-exist- 
ent or of doubtful genuineness than upon others 
which are themes for the chapters of this 
booklet. 

T. F. W. 



CONTENTS 



THE CONCORD PILGRIMAGE 

PAGE 

I. A Village of Literary Shrines. 
Abodes of Thoreau — The Alcotts — Channing — Sanborn 
- Hudson - Hoar - Wheildon - Bartlett - The His- 
toric Common — Cemetery — Church 1 7 

II. The Old Manse. 
Abode of Dr. Ripley — The Emersons — Hawthorne — 
Learned Mrs. Ripley — Its Famed Study and 
Apartments -Grounds —Guests — Ghosts — A Tran- 
scendental Social Court 28 

III. A Storied River and Battle-field. 

Where Zenobia Dronvned — Where Embattled Farmers 
Fought — Thoreau s Hemlocks — Haunts of Haw- 
thorne— Channing — Thoreau — Emerson, etc. , . 39 

IV. The Home of Emerson. 

An Intellectual Capitol and Pharos — Its Grounds, Li- 
brary, and Literary Workshop - Famous Rooms 
and Visitants -Relics and Reminiscences of the 
Concord Sage AC 

V. The Orchard House and its Neighbors. 
Ellery Channing-Margaret Fuller— The Alcotts— Pro- 
fessor Harris - Summer School of Philosophy — 
9 



Contents 

PACK 

Where Little fVomen nvas ivritten and Robert 
Hagburn lived-TVhere Cyril Norton ivas slain . 52 

VI. Hawthorne's Wayside Home. 
Sometime Abode of Alcott— Hawthorne— Lathrop-Mar- 
garet Sidney — Storied Apartments — Hawthorne'' s 
Study - His Mount of Vision - Where Septimius 
Felton and Rose Garfield dwelt 58 

VII. The Walden of Thoreau. 
A Transcendental Font-Emerson^ s Garden-Thoreau" s 
Cove-Catrn-Beanfield-Resort of Emerson-Haw- 
thorne-Channing-Hosmer-Alcottf etc 68 

VIII. The Hill-top Hearsed with Pines. 
Last Resting- Place of the Illustrious Concord Company— 

Their Graves beneath the Piny Boughs .... 75 



IN AND OUT OF LITERARY BOSTON 

IN BOSTON 

A Golden Age of Letters-Literary Associations- Isms- 
Clubs— Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham 
lived— The Corner Book- store— Home of Fields- 
Sargent — Hilliard—Aldrich — Deland- Parkman — 
Holmes - Howells - Moulton - Hale - Howe - Jane 
Austin^ etc 83 

OUT OF BOSTON 

I. Cambridge: Elmwood: Mount Auburn. 
Holmes's Church-yard -Bridge- Smithy y Chapel^ and 
River of Long fellow'' s Verse- Abodes of Lettered 



Contents 

PAGE 

Culture - Holmes - Higgimon - Agaaiz- Norton - 
Clough - Hoivells - Fuller - Longfellonv - Loiuell- 
Longfelloiu' i City of the Dead and its Precious 
Graves 103 



II. Belmont : The Wayside Inn : Home of 
Whittier. 
Lowell ''s Beaver Brook — ^bode of Trowbridge — Red 
Horse Tavern-Parsons and the Company of Long- 
fellow'' s Friends-Birthplace of ff^hittier-Scenes of 
his Poems-Dwelling and Grave of the Countess- 
Powow Hill— fVhittier^s Amesbury Home — His 
Church and Tomb II7 

HI. Salem : Whittier's Oak-Knoll and be- 
yond. 
Cemetery of Hawthorne' s Ancestors-Birthplace of Haiv- 
thorne and his Wife — Where Fame was won — 
House of the Seven Gables— Custom- House— Where 
Scarlet Letter ivas ivritten — Main Street and 
Witch Hill - Sights from a Steeple - Later Home 
of Whittier -Norman" s Woe— Lucy Larcom— Par- 
ton ^ etc.— Rivermouth—Thaxter 128 

IV. Webster's Marshfield : Brook Farm, etc. 

Scenes of the Old Oaken Bucket - Webster'' s Home and 

Grave —Where Emerson ivon his Wife — Home of 

Miss Peabody —Parkman —Miss Guiney -Aldrich's 

Ponkapog — Farm of Ripley^ s Community — Relics 

and Reminiscences 141 

II 



Contents 
IN BERKSHIRE WITH HAWTHORNE 

I. The Graylock and Hoosac Region. 

North Adams and about— Haivthorne' i Acquaintances 
and Excursions — Actors and Incidents of Ethan 
Brand-Kiln of Bertram the Lime- Burner-Nat- 
ural Bridge — Graylock - Thoreau — Hoosac Moun- 
tain-Deerf eld Arch- fVilliamstoivn-Bryant . . 155 

II. Lenox and Middle Berkshire. 
Beloved of the Litterateurs- La Maison Rouge-Where 
The House of the Se-ven Gables ivas ivritten — 
Wonder-Book and Tangleivood Scenes— The Boivl- 
Beecher'' s Laurel Lake -Kemble -BryanC s Monu- 
ment Mountain - Stockbridge - Catherine Sedgivick 
—Mel'ville'' s Piazza and Chimney —Holmes -Long- 
felloiv - Fittsfield 176 

A DAY WITH THE GOOD GRAY POET 

Walk and Talk 'with Socrates in Camden -The Bard^s 
Appearance and Surroundings — Recollections of his 
Life and Work — Hospital Ser-vice — Praise for his 
Critics-His Literary Habit, Purpose, Equipment, 
and Style-His Religious Bent-Readings .... 20 1 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



PAGB 



J The Wayside, Concord Frontispiece. 

!* The Thoreau-Alcott House, — Present Appearance . . 21 

-The Grave of Emerson 78 

- Where Longfellow lived 108 



'X'he concord pilgrimage 



I. A Village of Literary Shrines 
II. The Old Manse 

III. Storied River and Battle-field 

IV. The Home of Emerson 

V. Alcott's Orchard House, etc, 

VI. Hawthorne's Wayside Home 

VII. The Walden of Thoreau 

VIII. The Hill-top Hearsed with 

Pines 



I 

A VILLAGE OF LITERARY 
SHRINES 

Abodes of Thoreau — The Alcotti — Channing — Sanborn — 
Hudson - Hoar - Wheildon - BartUtt - The Historic 
Common — Cemetery — Church. 

TF to trace the footsteps of genius and to 
linger and muse in the sometime haunts of 
the authors we read and love, serve to bring us 
nearer their personality, to place us en rapport 
with their aspirations, and thus to incite our 
own spiritual development and broaden and 
exalt our moral nature, then the Concord pil- 
grimage should be one of the most fruitful and 
beneficent of human experiences. Familiarity 
with the physical stand-point of our authors, 
with the scenes amid which they lived and 
wrote, and with the objects which suggested 
the imagery of their poems, the settings of 
their tales, and which gave tone and color to 
their work, will not only bring us into closer 
sympathy with the writers, but will help us ta 
a better understanding of the writings. 

A plain, straggling village, set in a low 
country amid a landscape devoid of any striking 
beauty or grandeur. Concord yet attracts more 

B ,7 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

pilgrims than any other place of equal size upon 
the continent, not because it holds an historic 
battle-field, but because it has been the dwelling- 
place of some of the brightest and best in 
American letters, who have here written their 
books and warred against creeds, forms, and 
intellectual servitude. It is another Stratford, 
another Mecca, to which come reverent pil- 
grims from the Old World and the New to wor- 
ship at its shrines and to wander through the 
scenes hallowed by the memories of its illus- 
trious litterateurs, seers, and evangels. To the 
literary prowler it is all sacred ground, — its 
streets, its environing hills, forests, lakes, and 
streams have alike been blessed by the loving 
presence of genius, have alike been the theatres 
and the inspirations of noble literary achieve- 
ment. 

Our way lies by historic Lexington, and 
thence, through a pleasant country and by the 
road so fateful to the British soldiery, we ap- 
proach Concord. It is a placid, almost somno- 
lent village of villas, abounding with delightful 
lawns and gardens, with great elms shading its 
old-fashioned thoroughfares and drooping their 
pliant boughs above its comfortable homes. 

Elizabeth Hoar has said, ** Concord is Tho- 
reau*s monument, adorned with inscriptions by 
i8 



A Village of Literary Shrines 

his hand ;" of the circle of brilliant souls who 
have given the town its world-wide fame, he 
alone was native here ; he has left his imprint 
upon the place, and we meet some reminder of 
him at every turn. By the historic village Com- 
mon is the quondam home of his grandfather, 
where his father was reared, and where the 
** New England Essene" himself lived some 
time with the unmarried aunt who made the 
ample homespun suit he wore at Walden. The 
house of his maternal grandmother, where Henry 
David Thoreau was born, stood a little way out 
on a by-road to Lexington, and a daughter of 
this home — Thoreau's winsome aunt Louisa 
Dunbar — was ineffectually wooed by the famous 
Daniel Webster. At the age of eight months 
the infant Thoreau was removed to the village, 
in which nearly the whole of his life was passed. 
Believing that Concord, with its sylvan environ- 
ment, was a microcosm " by the study of which 
the whole world could be comprehended," this 
wildest of civilized men seldom strayed beyond 
its familiar precincts. Alcott declared that 
Thoreau thought he dwelt in the centre of the 
universe, and seriously contemplated annexing 
the rest of the planet to Concord. 

On the south side of the elm-shaded Main 
street of the village we find a pleasant and com- 
19 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

fortable, old-fashioned wooden dwelling, — the 
home which, in his later years, the philosopher, 
poet, and mystic shared with his mother and 
sisters. About it are great trees which Thoreau 
planted ; a stairway and some of the partition 
walls of the house are said to have been erected 
by him. In the second story of an extension at 
the back of the main edifice, some of the family 
worked at their father's trade of pencil-making. 
In the large room at the right of the entrance, 
afterward the sitting-room of the Alcotts, some 
of Thoreau's later writing was done, and here, 
one May morning of 1862, he breathed out a 
life all too brief and doubtless abbreviated by 
the storms and drenchings endured in his pan- 
theistic pursuits. In this house Thoreau's " spir- 
itual brother," John Brown of Osawatomie, was 
a welcome guest, and more than one wretched 
fugitive from slavery found shelter and protec- 
tion. From his village home Thoreau made, 
with the poet Ellery Channing, the journey 
described in his " Yankee in Canada," and sev- 
eral shorter " Excursions," — shared with Ed- 
ward Hoar, Channing, and others, — which he 
has detailed in the delightful manner which gives 
him a distinct position in American literature. 

After the removal of Sophia, the last of 
Thoreau's family, his friend Frank B. Sanborn 



A Village of Literary Shrines 

occupied the Thoreau house for some years, and 
then it became the home of the Alcott family. 
Here Mrs. Alcott, the " Marmee" of " Little 
Women," died ; here Bronson Alcott was stricken 
with the fatal paralysis ; here commenced the 
malady which contributed to the death of his 
illustrious daughter Louisa ; here lived " Meg," 
the mother of the " Little Men" and widow of 
"John Brooke" of the Alcott books; and here 
now lives her son, while his brother, " Demi- 
John," dwells just around the corner in the next 
street. In the room at the left of the hall, 
fitted up for her study and workshop, Louisa 
Alcott wrote some of the tales which the world 
will not forget. An added apartment at the 
right of the sitting-room was long the sick-room 
of the Orphic philosopher and the scene of 
Louisa's tender care. Here the writer saw them 
both for the last time : Alcott helpless upon his 
couch, his bright intelligence dulled by a veil of 
darkness ; the daughter at his bedside, sedulous 
of his comfort, devoted, hopeful, helpful to the 
end. A cherished memento of that interview 
is a photograph of the Thoreau-Alcott mansion, 
made by one of the ** Little Men," and presented 
to the writer, with her latest book, by "Jo" her- 
self. The front fence has since been removed, 
and the illustration shows the present view. 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

In Thoreau*s time, a modest dwelling, with a 
low roof sloping to the rear, — now removed to 
the other side of the street, — stood directly op- 
posite his home, and was for some time the 
abode of his friend and earliest biographer, the 
sweet poet William Ellery Channing. Thoreau 
thought Channing one of the few who under- 
stood " the art of taking walks," and the two 
were almost constant companions in saunterings 
through the countryside, or in idyllic excursions 
upon the river in the boat which Thoreau kept 
moored to a riverside willow at the foot of 
Channing's garden. The beneficent influence 
of their comradeship is apparent in the work of 
both these recluse writers, and many of the 
most charming of Channing's stanzas are either 
inspired by or are poetic portrayals of the scenes 
he saw with Thoreau, — the ** Rudolpho" and the 
" Idolon** of his verse. Thoreau*s last earthly 
«* Excursion" was with this friend to Monadnoc, 
where they encamped some days in i860. To 
this home of Channing came, in 1855, Sanborn, 
who was welcomed to Concord by all the lit- 
erary galaxy, and quickly became a familiar 
associate of each particular star. To go swim- 
ming together seems to have been, among these 
earnest and exalted thinkers, the highest evidence 
of mutual esteem, and so favored was Sanborn 
22 



A Village of Literary Shrines 

that he is able to record, " I have swum with 
Alcott in Thoreau's Cove, vv^ith Thoreau in the 
Assabet, with Channing in every water of Con- 
cord." 

In this home Sanborn entertained John Brown 
on the eve of his Virginia venture ; here escap- 
ing slaves found refuge ; here fugitives from the 
Harper's Ferry fight were concealed ; here San- 
born was arrested for supposed complicity in 
Brown's abortive schemes, and was forcibly 
rescued by his indignant neighbors. This 
modest dwelling gave place to the later residence 
of Frederic Hudson, the historian of journalism, 
who here produced many of his contributions to 
literature. Professor Folsom, of ** Translations 
of the Four Gospels," and the popular authoress 
Mrs. Austin have also lived in this neighbor- 
hood. 

For some years Sanborn had a famous select 
school on a street back of Thoreau's house, not 
far from the recent hermit-home of his friend 
Channing, at whose request Hawthorne sent 
some of his children to this school, in which 
Emerson's daughter — the present Mrs. Forbes — 
was a beloved pupil, and where, also, the daugh- 
ters of John Brown were for some time placed. 

A few rods westward from his former dwell- 
ing we find Sanborn in a tasteful modern villa, — 
23 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

spending life's early autumn among his books. 
He abounds with memories of his friends of the 
by-gone time, and his reminiscences and biog- 
raphies of some of them have largely employed 
his pen in his pleasant study here. 

Some time ago the sweet singer Channing 
suffered in his hermitage a severe illness, which 
prompted his appreciative friend Sanborn to take 
him into his own home ; so we find two sur- 
viving witnesses or participants in the moral, 
intellectual, and political renaissance dwelling 
under the same roof. In the kindly atmosphere 
of this home, the shy poet — who in his age is 
more recluse than ever, and scarce known to his 
neighbors — so far regained physical vigor that 
he has resumed his frequent visits to the Boston 
library, long time a favorite haunt of his. The 
world refused to listen to this exquisite singer, 
and now " his songs have ceased." He has been 
celebrated by Emerson in the " Dial," by Thoreau 
in his " Week," by Hawthorne in " Mosses" and 
" Note-Books," by the generous and sympathetic 
Sanborn in many ways and places ; but even such 
poems as " Earth-Spirit," " Poet's Hope," and 
" Reverence" found few readers, — the dainty 
little volumes fewer purchasers. 

Below the Thoreau-Alcott house on the vil- 
lage street was a prior home of Thoreau, from 
24 



A Village of Literary Shrines 

which he made, with his brother, the voyage 
described in his ** Week on the Concord and 
Merrimac Rivers," and from which, in superb 
disdain of " civilization" and social convention- 
alities, he went to the two years' hermitage of 
" Walden." 

Nearly opposite the earlier residence of the 
stoic is the home of the Hoars, where lived 
Thoreau's comrade Edward Hoar, and Edward's 
sister, — styled " Elizabeth the Wise'* by Emer- 
son, of whom she was the especial friend and 
favorite, having been the fiancee of his brother 
Charles, who died in early manhood. The 
adjacent spacious mansion was long the home 
of Wheildon, the historian, essayist, and pam- 
phleteer. Nearer the village Common lived 
John A. Stone, dramatist of " The Ancient 
Briton" and of the " Metamora" in which 
Forrest won his first fame. In this part of the 
village the eminent correspondent " Warring- 
ton," author of *' Manual of Parliamentary Law,'* 
was born and reared ; and in Lowell Street, not 
far away, lives the gifted George B. Bartlett, of 
the " Carnival of Authors," — poet, scenic artist, 
and local historian. 

In the public library we find copies of the 
printed works of the many Concord authors, 
and portraits or busts of most of the writers. 
^5 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

Among the treasures of the institution are priceless 
manuscripts of Curtis, Motley, Lowell, Holmes, 
Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and others. 

Among the thickly- strewn graves on the hill- 
side above the Common repose the ashes of 
Emerson's ancestors ; about them lie the fore- 
fathers of the settlement, — some of them asleep 
here for two centuries, reckless alike of the re- 
sistance to British oppression and of the later 
struggle for freedom of thought which their 
townsmen have waged. A tree on the Common 
is pointed out as that beneath which Emerson 
made an address at the dedication of the sol- 
diers* monument, and Bartlett records the tra- 
dition that the grandfather of the Concord sage 
stood on the same spot a hundred years before 
to harangue the ** embattled farmers" on the 
morning of the Concord fight. 

Near by is the ancient church where Emer- 
son's ancestors preached, and within whose 
framework the Provincial Congress met. Of 
the religious services here Emerson was always 
a supporter, often an attendant ; here he some- 
times preached in early manhood ; here his 
children were christened by the elder Channing, 
— " the first minister he had known who was as 
good as they;" here Emerson's daughter is a 
devout worshipper. 

26 



A Village of Literary Shrines 

The comparatively few of the transcendental 
company who prayed within a pew came to this 
temple, but here all were brought at last for 
funeral rites : here lay Thoreau among his 
thronging townsmen while Emerson and Bron- 
son Alcott made their touching eulogies and 
Ellery Channing read a dirge in a voice almost 
hushed with emotion ; here James Freeman 
Clarke, who had married Hawthorne twenty- 
two years before, preached his funeral sermon 
above the lifeless body which bore upon its 
breast the unfinished " Dolliver Romance ;" be- 
fore the pulpit here lay the coffined Emerson, — 
" his eyes forever closed, his voice forever still," 
— while a vast concourse looked upon him for 
the last time, and his neighbor Judge Hoar pro- 
nounced one of the most impressive panegyrics 
that ever fell from human lips, and the devoted 
Alcott read a sonnet. 



*7 



II 

THE OLD MANSE 



Abode of Dr. Ripley — The Emersons — Hatuthorne — Learned 
Mrs. Ripley— Its Famed Study and Apartments— Grounds— 
Guests-Ghosts-A Transcendental Social Court. 

^^ORTHWARD from the village Common, 
-^'^ a delightful stroll along a shaded highway, 
less secluded now than when Hawthorne " daily- 
trudged" upon it to the post-office or trundled 
the carriage of " baby Una," brings us to the 
famous " Old Manse" about which he culled his 
" Mosses." 

This antique mansion was first tenanted by 
Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandsire, and next by 
Dr. Ezra Ripley, who married the previous 
occupant's widow and became guardian of her 
children, — born under its roof, — of whom Emer- 
son's father was one. When his father died 
Emerson found a secondary home here with Dr. 
Ripley. The Manse was again the abode of 
Emerson and his mother in 1834-35, when he 
here wrote his first volume. In 1842, the year 
following the demise of the good Dr. Ripley, 
the Manse was profaned by its first lay occupant, 
Nathaniel Hawthorne. He brought here his 
bride, lovely Sophia Peabody (who, with the 
28 



The Old Manse 

gifted Elizabeth and Mrs. Horace Mann, formed 
a famous triune sisterhood), and for four years 
lived here the ideal life of which his " Note- 
Books" and " Mosses" give us such delicious 
glimpses. Hawthorne's landlord, Samuel Ripley, 
was related to the George Ripley with whom 
Hawthorne had recently been associated at 
Brook Farm. He was uncle of Emerson, and 
preached his ordination sermon ; was himself 
reared in the old Manse, and succeeded Haw- 
thorne as resident there. His widow, born 
Sarah Bradford, and celebrated as " the most 
learned woman ever seen in New England," the 
close friend of Emerson and of the brilliant 
Concord company, survived here until 1876. 
She made a valuable collection of lichens, and 
sometimes trained young men for Harvard Uni- 
versity. Conway records that a savant called 
here one day and found her hearing at once the 
lesson of one student in Sophocles and that of 
another in Differential Calculus, while rocking 
her grandchild's cradle with one foot and shell- 
ing peas for dinner. The place is now owned 
by her daughters, who reside in Cambridge, and 
is rented in summer. 

It is little changed since the time Emerson's 
ancestor hurried thence to the gathering of his 
parishioners by his church-door before the Con- 
29 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

cord battle, — still less changed since the halcyon 
days when the great wizard of romance dwelt — 
the " most unknown of authors" — within its 
shades. It is still the unpretentious Eden, ** the 
El Dorado for dreamers," which so completely 
won the heart of the sensitive Hawthorne. 

The picturesque old mansion stands amid 
greensward and foliage, its ample grounds di- 
vided from the highway by a low wall. The 
gate-way is flanked by tall posts of rough-hewn 
stone, whence a grass-grown avenue, bordered 
by a colonnade of overarching trees, leads to the 
house. Within the scattered sunshine and shade 
of the avenue, a row of stone slabs sunken in the 
turf like gravestones paves the path paced by 
Ripley, Emerson, and Hawthorne as they pon- 
dered and planned their compositions. Of the 
trees aligned upon either side, some, gray-li- 
chened and broken, are survivors of Hawthorne's 
time ; others are set to replace fallen patriarchs 
and keep the stately lines complete. At the 
right of the broad allee and extending away to 
the battle-ground is the field, waving now with 
lush grass, where Hawthorne and Thoreau 
found the flint arrow-heads and other relics of 
an aboriginal village. Upon the space which 
skirts the other side of the avenue, Hawthorne 
had the garden which engaged so much of his 
30 



The Old Manse 

time and thought, and where he produced for 
us abundant crops of something better than his 
vegetables. Here his Brook-Farm experience 
was useful. Passing neighbors would often see 
the darkly-clad figure of the recluse hoeing in 
this ** patch," or, as often, standing motionless, 
gazing upon the ground so fixedly and so long 
— sometimes for hours together — that they 
thought him daft. Of the delights of summer 
mornings spent here with his peas, potatoes, 
and squashes, he gives us many glimpses in his 
record of that happy time ; but the " Note- 
Books" show us, alas ! that this simple pleasure 
was not without alloy, for, although his "gar- 
den flourished like Eden," there are hints of 
"weeds," next "more weeds," then a "fero- 
cious banditti of weeds" with which *' the 
other Adam" could never have contended. 
But a greater woe came with the foes who 
menaced his artistic squashes, — "the uncon- 
scionable squash-bugs," " those infernal squash- 
bugs," against which he must "carry on con- 
tinual war." For the moments that we con- 
template the scene of his entomic warfare, the 
greater battle-field, a few rods away, seems 
hardly more impressive. Few of the trees 
which in Hawthorne's time stood nearest the 
house remain ; the producers of the peaches 
3* 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

and *< thumping pears'* have gone the way of 
all trees. So has Dr. Ripley's famous willow 
— celebrated in Emerson's and Channing's exqui- 
site verse and in Hawthorne's matchless prose 
— which veiled the western face of the mansion 
and through which Hawthorne's study-windows 
peeped out upon orchard, river, and mead. In 
the orchard that has borne such luscious fruit 
of fancy, some of the contorted and moss-grown 
trees, whose branches — "like withered hands 
and arms" — hold out the sweet blossoms on this 
June day, are the same that Hawthorne pict- 
ures among his " Mosses," and beneath which 
he lay in summer reverie. Few vines now 
clamber upon the house-walls, lilacs still grow 
beneath the old study-window, and a tall mass 
of their foliage screens a corner of the venerable 
edifice, which time has toned into perfect har- 
mony with its picturesque environment. It is 
a great, square, wooden structure of two stories, 
with added attic rooms beneath an overwhelm- 
ing gambrel roof, which is the conspicuous 
feature of the edifice and contributes to its 
antique form. The heavy roof settles down 
close upon the small, multipaned windows. 
From above the door little convex glasses, like 
a row of eyes, look out upon the visitor as he 
applies for admission. 

3* 



The Old Manse 

A spacious central hall, rich in antique 
panelling and sombre with grave tints, extends 
through the house. From its dusk and cool- 
ness we look out upon the bright summer day- 
through its open doors ; through one we see 
the ** hill of the Emersons" beyond the high- 
way, the other frames a pleasing picture of 
orchard and sward with glimpses of the river 
shining through its bordering shrubbery. The 
quaint apartments are darkly wainscoted and 
low-ceiled, with massive beams crossing over- 
head. Some of these rooms Hawthorne has 
shown us. The one at the left, which the 
novelist believed to have been the sleeping- 
room of Dr. Ripley, was the parlor of the 
Hawthornes, and — decked with a gladsome 
carpet, pictures, and flowers daily gathered 
from the river-bank — Hawthorne averred it was 
" one of the prettiest and pleasantest rooms in 
the whole world." To this room then came 
the sage Emerson "with a sunbeam in his 
face ;" the ** cast-iron man" Thoreau, " long- 
nosed, queer-mouthed, ugly as sin," but with 
whom to talk " is like hearing the wind among 
the boughs of a forest tree ;" Ellery Channing, 
with his wife and her illustrious sister, Margaret 
Fuller ; the gifted George William Curtis, then 
tilling a farm not far from the Manse, long be- 
c 33 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

fore he lounged in an " Easy Chair ;" genial 
Bradford, relative of Ripley, and associate and 
firm friend of Hawthorne ; Horatio Bridge, of 
the ** African Cruiser" and of the recent Haw- 
thorne " Recollections ;" fhe critic George Hil- 
liard, at whose house Hawthorne was married ; 
" Prince" Lowell, the large-hearted ; Franklin 
Pierce, Hawthorne's life-long friend. Concern- 
ing the discussion of things physical and meta- 
physical, to which these old walls then listened, 
the host gives us little hint. Sometimes the 
guests were " feasted on nectar and ambrosia" 
by the new Adam and Eve; sometimes they 
** listened to the music of the spheres which, 
for private convenience, is packed into a music- 
box," — left here by Thoreau when he went 
to teach in the family of Emerson's brother; 
once here before this wide fireplace they sat 
late and told ghost stories, — doubtless suggested 
by the clerical phantom whose sighs they used 
to hear in yonder dusky corner, and whose 
rustling gown sometimes almost touched the 
company as he moved about among them. In 
this room Dr. Ripley penned, besides his 
" History of the Concord Fight" and " Treatise 
on Education," three thousand of his protracted 
homilies, — a fact upon which Hawthorne found 
it "awful to reflect," — and here in our day the 
34 



The Old Manse 

gifted George B. Bartlett wrote some part of his 
Concord sketches, etc. Here, too, and in the 
larger room opposite, the erudite and versatile 
Mrs. Samuel Ripley held her social court and 
received the exalted Concord conclave, with 
other earnest leaders of thought. 

In the front chamber at the right Hawthorne's 
first child, the hapless Una, — named from Spen- 
ser's " Faerie Queene," — was born. Behind this 
is the " ten-foot-square** apartment which was 
Hawthorne*s study and workshop. Two win- 
dows of small, prismatic-hued panes look into the 
orchard, and upon one of these Hawthorne has 

inscribed, — 

" Nath'. Hawthorne. 
^This is his study, 1843." 

Below this another hand has graven, — 

** Inscribed by my husband at 

Sunset Apr 3* 1843 

In the gold light S. A. H. 

Man's accidents are God's purposes. 

Sophia A. Hawthorne 1843.'* 

From its north window, said to have been cracked 
by the explosions of musketry in the conflict, we 
see the battle-field and a reach of the placid river. 
This room had been the study of Emerson's 
grandfather ; from its window his wife watched 
35 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

the fight between his undrilled parishioners and 
the British veterans. His daughter Mary — aunt 
of our American Plato and herself a gifted writer 
— used to boast ** she was in arms at the battle,'* 
having been held up at this window to see the 
soldiery in the highway. Years later Emerson 
himself came into possession of this room, and 
here wrote his ** Nature," antagonizing many 
of the orthodox tenets. Perhaps it was well 
for the moral serenity of his ancestor — to whom 
the transcendental movement would have seemed 
arrant March-madness — that he could not fore- 
see the composition of such a volume here within 
the sanctity of his old study. The book was 
published anonymously, and Sanborn says that 
when inquiry was made, " Who is the author 
of * Nature ?' " a Concord wit replied, ** God 
and Waldo Emerson." 

Next, the dreamy Hawthorne succeeded to the 
little study, and here, with the sunlight glimmer- 
ing through the willow boughs, he worked in 
solitude upon his charming productions for three 
or four hours of each day. Here, besides the 
copious entries in his journals, he prepared most 
of the papers of his " Mosses," wrote many 
articles for the *' Democratic Review" and other 
magazines, edited ** Old Dartmoor Prisoner" and 
Horatio Bridge's " African Cruiser." It is note- 
36 



The Old Manse 

worthy that the " Celestial Railroad," in which 
Hawthorne records his condemnation of the 
spiritual renaissance by substituting the " terrible 
giant Transcendentalist'* (who feeds upon pil- 
grims bound for the Celestial City) in place of 
the Pope and Pagan of Bunyan*s allegory, was 
written in the same room with Emerson*s volume, 
which inaugurated the great transcendental move- 
ment in the Western World. 

Among the recesses of the great attic of the 
Manse we may still see the " Saints* Chamber," 
with its fireplace and single window ; but it is 
tenanted by sprouting clergymen no longer. The 
atmosphere of theological twilight and mustiness 
— acquired from generations of clerical inhabit- 
ants — which pervaded the place in Hawthorne's 
time has been dissipated by the larger and happier 
home-life of Mrs. Samuel Ripley and the blithe 
and brilliant company that gathered about her 
here. Dismayed by these beneficent influences, 
the ghosts have indignantly deserted the man- 
sion; even the persistive clerical, who sighed in 
Hawthorne's parlor and noisily turned his ser- 
mon-leaves in the upper hall, has not disturbed 
the later occupants of the Manse. 

One might muse and linger long about the old 
place which, as his " Mosses" and journals show, 
Hawthorne made a part of his very life. Its air 
37 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

of antiquity, its traditional associations, its se- 
clusion, and all its peaceful environment were 
pleasing to the shy and susceptible nature of the 
subtle romancer, and accorded well with his 
introspective habit. Besides, it was " the first 
home he ever had," and it was shared with his 
"new Eve." No wonder is it that he could 
here declare, " I had rather be on earth than in 
the seventh heaven, just now." 

It is saddening to remember that, from this 
paradise, poverty drove him forth. 



38 



Ill 

A STORIED RIVER AND 
BATTLE-FIELD 

Where Zenobia Droiuned— Where Embattled Far men Fought 
—Thoreau s Hemlocks— Haunts of Hawthorne— Channing— 
Thoreau-Emerson^ etc. 

"OEHIND Hawthorne^s "Old Manse"— its 
•*-' course so tortuous that Thoreau suggested 
for Concord's escutcheon ** a field verdant with 
the river circling nine times round," so noise- 
less that he likened it to the " moccasined tread " 
of an Indian, so sluggish that Hawthorne had 
dwelt some weeks beside it before he determined 
which way its current lies — flows the Concord, 
** river of peace." This placid stream is the 
aboriginal " Musketaquid " of Emerson's poem, 
— sung of Thoreau, Channing, and many another 
bard, beloved of Hawthorne and pictured in rap- 
turous phrase in his " Note-Books" and " Mosses 
from an Old Manse." It was the delightful 
haunt of Hawthorne's leisure, the scene of the 
occurrence which inspired the most thrilling and 
high-wrought chapter of his romance. 

A grassy path, shaded by orchard trees, leads 
from the west door of the Manse to the river's 
margin at the place where Hawthorne kept his 
39 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

boat under the willows. The boat had before 
been the property of Thoreau, built by his hands 
and used by him on the famous voyage described 
in his " Week on the Concord and Merrimac 
Rivers." Hawthorne named the craft " Pond- 
Lily," because it brought so many cargoes of 
that beautiful flower to decorate his home. In 
it, alone or accompanied by Thoreau or Ellery 
Channing, he made the many delightful excur- 
sions he has described. Embarking on the 
slumberous stream, we follow the course of Haw- 
thorne's boat to many a scene made familiar by 
that dreamful romancer and by the poets and 
philosophers of Concord. First to the place, 
below the bridge of the battle, where one dark 
night Hawthorne and Channing assisted in re- 
covering from the water the ghastly body of the 
girl-suicide, an incident which made a profoundly 
horrible impression upon the sensitive novelist, 
and which he employed as the thrilling termi- 
nation of the tale of Zenobia in ** The Blithedale 
Romance," — portraying it with a tragic power 
which has never been surpassed. Thence we 
paddle up the placid stream, as it slumbers along 
its winding course between the meadows, kisses 
the tangled grasses and wild flowers that fringe 
its margins, bathes the roots and boughs of the 
elders and dwarf willows which overhang its 
40 



A Storied River and Battle-Field 

surface as if to gaze upon the reflections of their 
own loveliness mirrored there. The reach of 
river — *' from Nashawtuc to the Cliff" — above 
the confluence of the two branches was most 
beloved and frequented of Thoreau ; here he 
sometimes brought Emerson, as on that summer 
evening when the sage's diary records, ** the 
river-god took the form of my valiant Henry 
Thoreau and introduced me to the riches of his 
shadowy, starlit, moonlit stream," etc. 

The deeper portion of the river near the 
Manse was Hawthorne's habitual resort for 
bathing and fishing, but his longer solitary 
voyages and his " wild, free days" with Ellery 
Channing were upon the beautiful and sheltered 
North Branch, — the Assabeth of the ** Mosses," 
— which flows into the Concord a half-mile 
above the Manse. Into this branch we turn our 
boat, and through sunshine and shade we follow 
the winsome course of the lingering stream, 
finding new and delightful seclusion at every 
turn. A railway now lies along one lofty bank, 
but its unsightliness is concealed by long lines of 
willows planted by the loving hands of poet and 
artist, — Bartlett and French, — and the infre- 
quent trains little disturb the seclusion of the 
place. Giant trees, standing with " their feet 
fixed in the flood," bend their bright foliage 
41 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

above the softly-flowing stream and fleck its 
surface with shadows ; pond-lilies are still up- 
borne by its dreaming waters, and cardinal 
flowers bedeck its banks ; its barer reaches are 
ribbons of reflected sky. The spot on the 
margin locally known as ** The Hemlocks," and 
noted by Hawthorne as being only less sacred in 
his memory than the household hearth, remains 
itself undisturbed. Here a clump of great ever- 
greens projects from the base of the lofty bank 
above and across the stream, and forms on the 
shore a shaded bower, carpeted by the brown 
needles which have fallen through many a year. 
This was a favorite haunt of Hawthorne and 
Channing in blissful days ; here they prepared 
their sylvan noontide feasts ; here they lounged 
and dreamed ; here their " talk gushed up like 
the babble of a fountain." As we recline in 
their accustomed resting-place beside the sighing 
stream, and look up at the azure heaven through 
the boughs where erstwhile often curled the 
smoke of their lire, we vainly try to imagine 
something of what would be the converse, merry 
or profound, of such starry spirits amid such an 
inspiring scene, and we more than ever regret 
that neither the gentle poet nor the subtle ro- 
mancer has chosen to share that converse with 
his readers. 

4% 



A Storied River and Battle-Field 

Long and lovingly we loiter in this consecrated 

spot, and then slowly float back to Hawthorne's 
landing-place by his orchard wall. 

A few rods distant, at the corner of his field, 
is the site of the *' rude bridge that arched the 
flood," and the first battle-ground of the Amer- 
ican Revolution. On the farther side a colossal 
minute-man in bronze, modelled by the Concord 
sculptor French, surmounts a granite pedestal 
inscribed with Emerson's immortal epic, and 
marks the spot where stood the irregular array 
of the ** embattled farmers" when they here 
" fired the shot heard round the world." The 
statue replaces a bush which sprang from the 
soil fertilized by the blood of Davis, and which 
Emerson imaged as the ** burning bush where 
God spake for his people." 

The position of the British regulars on the 
hither shore is indicated by the " votive stone" 
of Emerson's poem, — a slender obelisk of granite, 
— and near it, close under the wall of the Manse 
enclosure, is the rude memorial that marks the 
grave of the British soldiers who were slain on 
this spot. The current tradition that a lad who, 
after the battle, came, axe in hand, from the 
Manse wood-pile, found one of the soldiers yet 
alive and dispatched him with the axe, was first 
related to Hawthorne by James Russell Lowell, 
43 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

as they stood together above this grave. The 
effect of this story upon the feelings of the sus- 
ceptible Hawthorne is told on a page of " The 
Old Manse," and — a score of years later and in 
different shape — is related in the romance of 
" Septimius Felton." 



44 



IV 

THE HOME OF EMERSON 



An Intellectual Capitol and Pharos — hi Grounds^ Library ^ 
and Literary Workihop — Famous Rooms and Visitants — 
Relics and Reminiscences of the Concord Sage. 

'POLLOWING the direction of the British 
•*• retreat from the historic Common, we 
come, beyond the village, to the modest mansion 
which was for half a century the abode of the 
princely man who was not only " the Sage of 
Concord," but, in the esteem of some contem- 
poraries, " was Concord itself.'* 

Emerson declares, " great men never live in a 
crowd," — "a scholar must embrace solitude as 
a bride, must have his glees and glooms alone." 
Of himself he says, "I am a poet and must 
therefore live in the country ; a sunset, a forest, 
a river view are more to me than many friends, 
and must divide my day with my books ;" and 
this was the consideration which finally deter- 
mined his withdrawal from the storm and fret 
of the city to his chosen home here by Walden 
woods and among the scenes of his childhood. 
It was his retirement to this semi-seclusion which 
called forth his much-quoted poem, " Good-by, 
proud world ! Pm going home." To him here 
45 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

came the afflatus he had before lacked, here his 
faculties were inspirited, and here his literary 
productiveness commenced. 

Behind a row of dense-leaved horse-chestnuts 
ranged along the highway, the quondam home 
of Emerson nestles among clustering evergreens 
which were planted by Bronson Alcott and 
Henry D. Thoreau for their friend. A copse 
of pines sighs in the summer wind close by; 
an orchard planted and pruned by Emerson's 
hands, and a garden tended by Thoreau, extend 
from the house to a brook flowing through the 
grounds and later joining the Concord by the 
famous old Manse ; beyond the brook lies the 
way to Walden. At the left of the house is a 
narrow open reach of greensward on the farther 
verge of which erst stood the unique rustic bower 
— with a wind-harp of untrimmed branches above 
it — which was fashioned by the loving hands of 
Alcott. The mansion is a substantial, square, 
clapboarded structure of two stories, with hip- 
roofs ; a square window projects at one side ; a 
wing is joined at the back ; covered porches 
protect the entrances ; light paint covers the 
plain walls which gleam through the bowering 
foliage, and the whole aspect of the place is de- 
lightfully attractive and home-like. Its pleasant 
and unpretentious apartments more than realize 
46 



The Home of Emerson 

the comfortable suggestion of the exterior. Ad- 
joining the hall on the right is the plain, rectan- 
gular room which was the philosopher's library 
and workshop. The cheerful fireplace and the 
simple furnishings of the room are little changed 
since he here laid down his pen for the last time ; 
the heavy table held his manuscript, his books are 
ranged upon the shelves, the busts and portraits 
he cherished adorn the walls, his accustomed 
chair is upon the spot where he sat to write. 

Emerson's afternoons were usually spent 
abroad, but his mornings were habitually passed 
among his books in this small corner-room — 
'* the study under the pines" — recording, in ** a 
pellucid style which his genius made classic," 
the truths which had come to him as he mused 
by shadowy lake or songful stream, in deep wood 
glade or wayside path. Most of all his pen pro- 
duced, of divinest poetry, of gravest philosophy, 
of grandest thought, was minted into words and 
inscribed in this simple apartment. 

The adjoining parlor — a spacious, pleasant, 
home-like room, furnished forth with many 
mementos of illustrious friends and guests — is 
scarcely less interesting than the library. This 
house was the intellectual capitol of the village ; 
to it freely came the Concord circle of shining 
ones, — Thoreau, Channing, Sanborn, the Al- 
47 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

cotts, the Hoars, — less frequently, Hawthorne. 
For a long time Mrs. Samuel Ripley habitually 
passed her Sabbath evenings here. The Delphic 
Margaret Fuller, who was as truly the " blood of 
transcendentalism" as Emerson " was its brain," 
was here for months an honored guest. For 
long periods Thoreau, whose fame owes much 
to Emerson's generosity, was here an inmate 
and intimate. In Emerson's parlor were held 
the more formal seances of the Concord galaxy ; 
here met the short-lived " Monday Evening 
Club," which George William Curtis whimsi- 
cally describes as a " congress of oracles," who 
ate russet-apples and discoursed celestially while 
Hawthorne looked on from his corner, — "a 
statue of night and silence;" here were held 
many of Bronson Alcott's famous "conversa- 
tions," as well as those of that disciple of Pla- 
tonism. Dr. Jones. 

Emerson belonged not to Concord only, but to 
the whole world, — " his thought was the thought 
of Christendom." To these plain rooms as to 
an intellectual court came, from his own and 
other lands, hundreds famed in art, literature, and 
politics. Here came Curtis and Bartol to sit at 
the feet of the sage ; Charles Sumner and Mon- 
cure Conway to bear hence — as one of them has 
said — '* memories like those Bunyan's pilgrim 
48 



The Home of Emerson 

must have cherished of the Interpreter." Here 
' came Theodore Parker from the fight for free 
thought," and Wendell Phillips and John Brown 
from the conflict for free men ; here came How- 
ells, bearing the line from Hawthorne, " I find 
this young man worthy ;" here came Whittier, 
Agassiz, Hedge, Longfellow, Bradford, Lowell, 
Colonel Higginson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia 
Ward Howe, as to a fount of wisdom and purity. 
In this unpretentious parlor have gathered such 
guests as Stanley, Walt Whitman, Bret Harte, 
Henry James, Louis Kossuth, Arthur Clough, 
Lord Amberley, Jones Very, Fredrika Bremer, 
Harriet Martineau, and many others who, like 
these, would have felt repaid for their journey 
over leagues of land and sea by a hand-clasp 
and an hour's communion with the intellect that 
has been the beacon of thousands in mental dark- 
ness and storm. With these came another class 
of pilgrims, the great army of impracticables, 
" men with long hair, long beards, long collars, — 
many with long ears, each in full chase after the 
millennium," and each intent upon securing the 
endorsement of Emerson for his own pet scheme. 
The wonder is that the little library saw any 
work accomplished, so many came to it and 
claimed the time of the master ; for to every 
one — scholar, tradesman, and " crank" — were 
D 49 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

accorded his never-failing courtesy and kindly- 
interest. Any one might be the bearer of a 
divine message, so he listened to all, — the most 
uncouth and outre visitant might be the coming 
man for w^hom his faith w^aited, therefore all 
were admitted. 

Here all were " assayed, not analyzed." 
Emerson's habitual quest for only the divinest 
traits and his quickened perception of the best 
in men enabled him to recognize excellencies 
which were yet unseen by others. While Haw- 
thorne, the shy hermit at the Manse, was un- 
heeded by the world and thought crazed by his 
neighbors, Emerson knew and proclaimed his 
transcendent genius. He first recognized the 
inspiration of Ellery Channing, and made for 
his exquisite verse exalted claims which have 
been fully justified, and which the world may 
yet allow. While to others Henry Thoreau 
was yet only an eccentric egotist, Emerson knew 
him as a poet and philosopher, and made him 
the " forest seer, the heart of all the scene," 
in his lyrical masterpiece ** Wood-Notes." He 
promptly hailed Walt Whitman as a true poet 

■\ while many of us were yet wondering if it were 

\ not charitable to think him insane. 

Emerson's cordiality won for him the honor 
which prophets rarely enjoy in their own country ; 
50 



The Home of Emerson 

the objects and places once associated with him 
here are still esteemed sacred by his old neigh- 
bors. We find among them at this day many 
who can know nothing of his books, but who, 
for memory of his simple kindness, go far from 
their furrow or swath to show us spots he loved 
and frequented in woodland or meadow, on 
swelling hill-side or by winding river. 

To his home here Emerson brought his bride 
sixty years ago; here he lived his fruitful life 
and accomplished his work ; here he rose to the 
zenith of poesy and prophecy ; to him here came 
the *' great and grave transition which may not 
king or priest or conqueror spare ;** from here 
his wife, lingering behind him in the eternal 
march, went a year or two ago to rejoin him on 
the piny hill-top ; and here his unmarried daugh- 
ter — of ** saint-like face and nun-like garb " — 
inhabits his home and cherishes its treasures. 

Emerson's son and biographer some time ago 
relinquished his medical practice in Concord, 
and has since devoted himself to art. He has a 
residence a mile or so out of the village, but 
spends much of his time abroad. Last year he 
lectured in London upon the lives and writings 
of some of the Concord authors. 



THE ORCHARD HOUSE AND 
ITS NEIGHBORS 

Ellery Channing- Margaret Fuller - The Alcotts- Professor 
Harris - Summer School of Philosophy - Where Little 
Women ivas ivritten and Robert Hagburn lived — 
Where Cyril Norton was slain. 

A PLAIN little cottage by the road, not far 
from Emerson's home, was for some time 
the abode of the companion of many of his 
rambles through the countryside, — the poet 
Ellery Channing. It was to this simple dwell- 
ing, as the author of " Little Women" once told 
the writer, that Channing brought his young wife 
— sister of Margaret Fuller — before the Alcotts 
had come to live in their hill-side home under the 
wooded ridge, and it was here he commenced 
the sequestered life so suited to his nature and 
tastes. 

Some of his descriptive poems of Concord 
landscapes were written in this little cottage. 
The scenes of one of his earlier winters in the 
neighborhood — when he chopped wood in a 
rude clearing — are portrayed in the exquisite 
lines of his " Woodman." In those days he 
thought his poems ** too sacred to be sold for 
5* 



The Orchard House and its Neighbors 

money," and they were kept for his circle of 
friends. Of the poet's modest home Miss 
Fuller — that " dazzling woman with the flame 
in her heart" — was a frequent inmate ; it was 
from Concord that she went to live in the family 
of Horace Greeley in New York. At the time 
of her visits at Channing's cottage Thoreau was 
sojourning with Emerson, and we may be sure 
that the quartette of starry souls, thus juxtapose, 
held much soulful and edifying converse. But 
those of us who deplore our lack of the supreme 
transcendental spirit which we ascribe to the 
Concord circle may find consolation in reflect- 
ing that some of this gifted company had also 
earthly tastes, and found even discourse concern- 
ing the " over-soul" sometimes tiresome. The 
** strained pitch of intellectual intensity" was, 
upon occasion, gladly relaxed ; thus we discover 
the exalted Channing sometime profanely in- 
viting Hawthorne — ** the gentlest man that 
kindly Nature ever drew" — to visit him in 
Concord, alluring the novelist with prospects of 
strong-waters, pipes and tobacco without end, 
and urging, as the utmost inducement, " Emerson 
is gone and there is nobody here to bore you." 

A few furlongs farther eastward, under the 
high-soaring elms of the Lexington road, we 
53 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

come to the " Orchard House" of Bronson Al- 
cott, " the grandfather of the ' Little Women.* " 
The tasteful dwelling stands several rods back 
from the street, nestling cosily at the foot of a 
pine-crowned slope, and having a wide, sunny- 
outlook in front. Embowered in orchards and 
vines, and shaded by the overreaching arms of 
giant elms, it seems a most delightful home for 
culture and contemplative study. The cottage 
itself is a low, wide, gabled, picturesquely ir- 
regular edifice, which our Pythagorean mystic 
evolved from a forlorn, box-like farm-house 
which he found here when he purchased the 
place. The rustic fence he set along the high- 
way is replaced by an ambitious modern structure. 
On this hill-side Alcott, the " most transcendent 
of the transcendentalists," lived for nearly thirty 
years, — but not all of that time in this house, — 
coming here first after the failure of his " Fruit- 
lands" community in 1845, and finally twelve 
years later. Prior to this he had been assisted 
by Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Peabody in 
his renowned Boston Temple School, which was 
a failure in a financial sense only, since it fur- 
nished a theme for Miss Peabody*s ** Record of 
a School," and Louisa Alcott's girlish recollec- 
tions of it provided her a model for the delight- 
ful " Plumfield" of her books. 
54 



The Orchard House and its Neighbors 

Alcott^s treatise on " Early Education," his 
" Gospels" and " Orphic Sayings," had been 
published, and his "very best contribution to 
literature" — his daughter Louisa — was also ex- 
tant before he came to this home, but it was here 
that his maturer works and most of his charming 
essays and " Conversations" were produced. 

In this house were held the early sessions of 
the Summer School of Philosophy, of which 
Alcott was the leading spirit ; here his daughter, 
the "Beth" of "Jo's" books, died. The in- 
terior of the ** Orchard House" is roomy and 
quaint and abounds in surprising nooks and cosy 
recesses. In the corner-room Louisa wrote 
" Little Women" and other delicious books ; 
in the room behind it. May, " our Madonna," 
— who died Madame Nieriker, — had her studio 
and practised the art which made her famous 
before her untimely end. In the great attic 
under the sloping roof the " Little Women" 
acted the "comic tragedies" written by "Jo" 
and " Meg" (some of them now published in a 
volume with a " Foreword" by " Meg") until 
the increasing audiences of Concord children 
caused the removal of the mimic stage to the 
big barn on the hill-side. 

Hawthorne makes this house the abode of 
Robert Hagburn in " Septimius Felton." Along 
55 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

the brow of the tree-clad ridge which overlooks 
the place, and to which Bronson Alcott resorted 
for the morning and evening view, the patriots 
hastened to intercept the retreat of the British 
troops, ** blackened and bloody." In the de- 
pression of the ridge just back of the house we 
find the spot where ** Septimius Felton" shot 
the young officer, Cyril Norton, and buried 
him under the trees. On the grave here 
" Septimius" sat with Rose Garfield and the 
half-crazed Sibyl Dacy ; here grew the crimson 
flower which he distilled in his " elixir of im- 
mortality," and here Sibyl came to die after her 
draught of the compound. 

After the removal of the Alcotts to the Tho- 
reau house in the village, " Apple Slump" — as 
Louisa sometimes called this orchard home — 
became the property and residence of that 
disciple of Hegel, Professor Harris, — once prin- 
cipal of the Summer School of Philosophy, 
and now the head of the National Bureau of 
Education at Washington, — who sometimes 
comes here in summer. 

The "Hillside Chapel," erected by Mrs. 
Elizabeth Thompson, of New York, for the 
sessions of the Summer Philosophers, is placed 
among the trees of the orchard adjoining Alcott*s 
old home. It is a plain little structure of wood, 
56 



The Orchard House and its Neighbors 

tasteful in design, with pointed gables and vine- 
draped porch and windows. Its embowered 
walls, unpainted and unplastered, seem " scarcely- 
large enough to contain the wisdom of the world,** 
but they have held assemblages of such lights as 
Emerson, Alcott, Sanborn, Bartol, McCosh, Hol- 
land, Porter, Lathrop, Stedman, Wilder, Hedge, 
Dr. Jones, Elizabeth Peabody, Ward Howe, Ed- 
nah Cheney, and other like seekers and promoters 
of fundamental truth. 



57 



VI 

HAWTHORNE'S WAYSIDE 
HOME. 

Sometime Abode of Alcott-Haivthorne-Lathrop-Margaret 
Sidney - Storied Apartmenti - Haiuthorne^ s Study -Hit 
Mount of Vision - Where Septimiui Felton and Rose 
Garfield dwelt. 

/^N the Lexington road, a little way beyond 
^-^ the Orchard House, is the once Wayside 
home of Hawthorne, the dwelling in which, at 
a tender age, Louisa M. Alcott made her first 
literary essay. It is a curious, wide, straggling, 
and irregular structure, of varying ages, heights, 
and styles. The central gambrel-roofed portion 
was the original house of four rooms, described 
as the residence of ** Septimius Felton ;" other 
rooms have been added at diiFerent periods and 
to serve the need of successive occupants, until 
an architecturally incongruous and altogether 
delightful mansion has been produced. To the 
ugly little square house which Alcott found here 
in 1845 and christened "Hillside" he added a 
low wing at each side, the central gable in the 
front of the old roof, and wide rustic piazzas 
across the front of the wings. No additions 
were made during Hawthorne's first residence 
58 



Hawthorne's Wayside Home 

here, nor during the occupancy of Mrs. Haw- 
thorne's brother, while the novelist was abroad ; 
but when Hawthorne returned to it in i860, 
with " most of his family twice as big as when 
they left," he enlarged one wing by adding the 
barn to it, heightened the other side-wing, erected 
two spacious apartments at the back, and crowned 
the edifice with a square third-story study, which, 
with its great chimney and many gables, overtops 
the rambling roofs like an observatory, and may 
have been suggested by the tower of the Villa 
Montauto, where he wrote " The Marble Faun." 
No important changes have been made by the 
subsequent owners of the place. 

Hawthorne's widow left the Wayside in 1868. 
It was afterward occupied by a school for young 
ladies ; then by Hawthorne's daughter Rose — 
herself a charming writer — with her husband, 
the gifted and versatile George Parsons Lathrop ; 
later it was purchased by the Boston publisher 
Daniel Lothrop, and has since been the summer 
home of his widow, who is widely known as 
" Margaret Sidney," the creator of " Five Little 
Peppers," and writer of many delightful books. 
Hawthorne said, anent his visit to Abbotsford, 
" A house is forever ruined as a home by having 
been the abode of a great man," — a truth well 
attested by the present amiable mistress of his 
59 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

own Wayside, whose experience with a legion 
of unaccredited, intrusive, and often insolent 
persons who come at all hours of the day, and 
sometimes in the night, demanding to be shown 
over the place, would be more ludicrous were it 
less provoking. 

Some details of the interior have been beau- 
tified by the aesthetic taste of Mrs. Lothrop, but 
an appreciative reverence for Hawthorne leads 
her to preserve his home and its belongings essen- 
tially unchanged. At the right of the entrance 
is an antique reception-room, which was Haw- 
thorne's study during his first residence here, as 
it had long before been the study of " Septimius 
Felton" in the tale. It is a low-studded apart- 
ment with floor of oaken planks, heavy beams 
strutting from its ceiling, a generous fireplace 
against a side wall, and with two windows look- 
ing out upon the near highway. In this room 
Hawthorne wrote " Tanglewood Tales" and 
" Life of Franklin Pierce ;" and here that creat- 
ure of his imagination, ** Septimius," brooded 
over his doubts and questions. Through yonder 
windows ** Septimius" saw the British soldiery 
pass and repass ; above this oaken mantel — now 
artistically fitted and embellished with rare pot- 
tery — he hung the sword of the officer he had 
slain ; before this fireplace he pored over the 
60 



Hawthorne's Wayside Home 

mysterious manuscript his dying victim had 
given him ; on this hearth he distilled the mystic 
potion, and here poor Sibyl quaffed it. The 
spacious room at the left, across the hall, was at 
first Haw^thorne*s parlor ; but after he enlarged 
the dw^elling this became the library, v^here he 
read aloud to the assembled family on winter 
evenings, and where his widow afterward tran- 
scribed his " Note-Books'* for publication. The 
sunny room above this was the chamber of the 
unfortunate Una ; Hawthorne's own sleeping 
apartment, on the second floor, is entered from 
the hall through the narrowest of door-ways. 
In the upper hall a little wall-closet was the re- 
pository of Hawthorne's manuscripts, and here, 
to the surprise of all, an entire unpublished 
romance was found after his death. From this 
hall a narrow stairway, so steep that one need 
cling to the iron rail at the side in order to scale 
it, ascends to Hawthorne's study in the tower, a 
lofty room with vaulted ceiling. On one side 
wall is the Gothic enclosure of the stairs, against 
which once stood his plain oaken writing-desk ; 
upon it the bronze inkstand he brought from 
Italy, where it held the ink for " The Marble 
Faun." In this inkstand, he declared, lurked 
" the little imp" which sometimes controlled his 
pen. Attached to a side of the staircase was the 
6i 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

high desk or shelf upon which he often wrote 
standing. Book-closets filled the corners at the 
back, and a little fireplace with a plain mantel 
was placed between two of the windows. Lov- 
ing hands have neatly decorated the ceiling, and 
painted upon the walls mottoes commemorative 
of the master who wrought here. The views 
he beheld through the windows of this sanctum 
when he lifted his eyes from his book or manu- 
script are tranquil and soothing : across his roofs 
in one direction he looked upon the sunny grass- 
lands of the valley ; in another he saw placid 
slopes of darkly-wooded hills and a reach of the 
elm-bordered road ; in a third direction, smiling 
fields and the vineyards where the famous Con- 
cord grape first grew met his vision ; and through 
his north windows appeared the thick woods 
that crowned his own hill-top, — so near that he 
" could see the nodding wild flowers'* among the 
trees and breathe the woodland odors. 

Local tradition declares that, to prevent intru- 
sion into this den, Hawthorne habitually sat 
upon a trap-door in the floor, which was the only 
entrance. Without this precaution he found in 
this eyrie the seclusion he coveted, and here, 
among the birds and the tree-tops, remote from 
the tumult of life and above ordinary distracting 
influences, he could linger undisturbed in that 
62 



Hawthorne's Wayside Home 

border-land between shadow and substance which 
was his delight, could evoke and fix upon his 
pages the weird creatures of his fancy. Several 
hours of each day he passed here alone in musing 
or composition, and here, besides some papers 
for the " Atlantic," he wrote " Our Old Home," 
** Grimshaw*s Secret," " Septimius Felton," and 
the ♦* Dolliver Romance" fragment. Years be- 
fore, Thoreau told him, the Wayside had once 
been inhabited by a man who believed he would 
never die. The thus suggested idea, of a death- 
less man associated with this house, seems to have 
clung to Hawthorne in his last years, and was 
embodied in both his later works, — the scene of 
** Septimius Felton" being laid here at the Way- 
side. No one knew aught of its composition, 
and the author, rereading the tale in the solitude 
of this study and finding it in some way lacking 
the perfection of his ideal, laid it away in his 
closet, and, in weariness and failing health, com- 
menced and vainly tried to finish the " Dolliver 
Romance" from the same materials. 

The house is separated from the highway by 
a narrow strip of sward, out of which grow elms 
planted by Bronson Alcott and clustering ever- 
greens rooted by Hawthorne himself. The 
greater part of his domain lies along the dark 
slope and the wooded summit of the ridge which 
63 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

rises close behind the house. At the extremity 
of the grounds nearest the Orchard House, a 
depression in the turf marks the site of the little 
house where dwelt the Rose Garfield of " Sep- 
timius." Hawthorne planted sunflowers in this 
hollow, and Julian, his son, remembers seeing 
the novelist stand here and contemplate their 
wide disks above the old cellar. 

On the steep hill-side remain the rough terraces 
Alcott fashioned when he occupied the place, 
and many of the flowering locusts and fruit-trees 
he and Thoreau planted. Here, too, are the 
sombre spruces and firs which Hawthorne sent 
from " Our Old Home" or planted after his 
return, and all are grown until they overshadow 
the whole place and fairly embower the house 
with their branches. Along the hill-side are the 
famous ** Acacia path" of Mrs. Hawthorne and 
other walks planned by the novelist, some of 
them having been opened by him in the last 
summer of his life. By one path, once familiar 
to his feet, we find our way up the steep ascent 
among the locusts to the ** Mount of Vision," — 
as Mrs. Hawthorne named the ridge to which 
the novelist daily resorted for study and medi- 
tation. 

The hill-top is clothed with a tangled growth 
of trees which hides it from the lower world 
64 



Hawthorne *s Wayside Home 

and renders it a fitting trysting-place for the 
wizard romancer and the mystic figures which 
abound in his tales. Along the brow we trace, 
among the ferns, vestiges of the pathway worn 
by his feet. In the safe seclusion of this spot 
he spent delectable hours, lying under the trees 
"with a book in his hands and an unwritten 
book in his thoughts," while the pines murmured 
to him of the mystery and shadow he loved. 
More often he sat on a rustic seat between yonder 
pair of giant trees, or paced his foot-path hour 
after hour, as he pondered his plots and worked 
out the mystic details of many romances, some 
of them never to be written. Walking here 
with Fields he unfolded his design of the " Dol- 
liver" tale, which he left half told. Here he 
composed the weird story of "Septimius Felton,'* 
while trudging on the very path he describes as 
having been worn by his hero, — Hawthorne 
himself habitually walking, with hands clasped 
behind him and with eyes bent on the ground, 
in the very attitude he ascribes to " Septimius" 
as Rose saw him " treading, treading, treading, 
many a year," on this foot-path by the grave of 
the officer he had slain. In this refuge Haw- 
thorne remained a whole day alone with his 
grief, when tidings came to him of the loss of 
his sister in the burning of the " Henry Clay." 
B 65 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

Here he sat with Howells one memorable after- 
noon. In the last years his wife was often with 
him here, sometimes walking, but more fre- 
quently sitting, with him, — as did Rose with 
** Septimius," — and looking out, through an 
opening in the foliage near the western end of 
his path, upon the restful landscape, not less 
charming to-day than when his eyes lovingly 
lingered upon it. We see the same broad, sun- 
kissed meadows awave with lush grass and flecked 
with fleeting cloud-shadows, and beyond, the dark 
forests of Thoreau's Walden and the gentle out- 
lines of low-lying hills which shut in the valley 
like a human life. 

For some months after the election to the 
Presidency of his friend Franklin Pierce, the 
Wayside was frequented by office-seekers ; but 
ordinarily Hawthorne had few visitors besides 
his Concord friends. Fields, Holmes, Hilliard, 
Whipple, Longfellow, Howells, Horatio Bridge, 
the poet Stoddard, Henry Bright, came to him 
here. The visits of " Gail Hamilton" (Miss 
Abigail Dodge), mentioned by Hawthorne as 
" a sensible, healthy-minded woman," were es- 
pecially enjoyed by him. His own visits were 
very infrequent ; " Orphic" Alcott said that in 
the several years he lived next door Hawthorne 
came but twice into his house : the first time he 
66 



Hawthorne's Wayside Home 

quickly excused himself " because the stove was 
too hot," next time " because the clock ticked 
too loud." 

The Wayside was the only home Hawthorne 
ever owned. To it he came soon after his 
removal from the " little red house" in Berk- 
shire, and to it he returned from his sojourn 
abroad ; here, with failing health and desponding 
spirits, he lived in the gloomy war-days, — writ- 
ing in his study or, with steps more and more 
uncertain, pacing his hill-top ; from here he set 
out with his life-long friend Pierce on the last 
sad journey which ended so quickly and quietly. 



VII 
THE WALDEN OF THOREAU 

A Transcendental Font-Emerson' i Garden-Thoreau* s Cove— 
Cairn-Beanjield - Resort of Emerson-Haivthorne-Chan- 
n'tng—Hosmer—Alcottf etc. 

/^NE long-to-be-remembered day we follow 
^-^ the shady foot-paths, once familiar to the 
sublimated Concord company, through their 
favorite forest retreats to " the blue-eyed Wal- 
den," — sung by many a bard, beloved by tran- 
scendental saint and seer. After a delightful 
stroll of a mile or more, we emerge from the 
wood and see the lovely lakelet *' smiling upon 
its neighbor pines." We find it a half-mile in 
diameter, with bold and picturesquely irregular 
margins indented with deep bays and mostly 
wooded to the pebbles at the water's edge. From 
this setting of emerald foliage it scintillates like 
a gem : its wavelets lave a narrow pebbly shore 
within which a bottom of pure white sand gleams 
upward through the most transparent water ever 
seen. At one point where the railway skirts the 
margin, the woods are disfigured with pavilions 
and tables for summer pleasure-seekers, and a 
farther wooded slope has recently been ravaged 
by fire ; but most of the shore has escaped both 
68 



The Walden of Thoreau 

profanation and devastation, so that the literary 
pilgrim will find the shrines he seeks little dis- 
turbed since the Concord luminaries here had 
their haunt. 

From the summit of the forest ledge which 
rises from the southern shore, the lakelet seems 
a foliage-framed patch of the firmament. This 
rocky eminence affords a wide and enchanting 
prospect, and was the terminus and object of 
many excursions of Emerson and the other 
"Walden-Pond- Walkers," as the transcendental- 
ists were styled by their more prosy and orthodox 
neighbors. It was upon this elevation in the 
midst of a portion of his estate which he cele- 
brates in his poetry as " My Garden" — whose 
" banks slope down to the blue lake-edge"— 
that Emerson proposed to erect a lodge or retreat 
for retirement and thought. A mossy path, once 
trodden almost daily by the philosopher and his 
friends, brings us to the beautiful and secluded 
cove where Emerson and Thoreau kept a boat, 
and where the shining ones often came to bathe 
in this limpid water. Ablution here seems to 
have been a sort of transcendent baptism, and 
many a visitor, eminent in art, thought, or let- 
ters, has boasted that he walked and talked with 
Emerson in Walden woods and bathed with him 
in Walden water. In this romantic nook Tho- 
69 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

reau spent much time during his hermitage, sit- 
ting in reverie on its banks or afloat on its glassy 
surface, fishing or playing his flute to the charmed 
perch. On the shore of this cove he procured 
the stones for the foundations and the sand for 
the plastering of his cabin. From the water*s 
edge an obscure path, bordered by the wild 
flowers he loved, winds among the murmuring 
pines up to the site of Thoreau*s retreat, on a 
gentle hill-side which falls away to the shore a 
few rods distant. A cairn of small stones, placed 
by reverent pilgrims, stands upon or near the 
spot where he erected his dwelling at an outlay 
of twenty-eight dollars and lived upon an income 
of one dollar per month. 

The hermit would hardly know the place now; 
his young pines are grown into giants that allow 
but glimpses of the shimmering lake ; even the 
" potato hole" he dug under his cabin, whence 
the squirrels chirped at him from beneath the 
floor as he sat to write, and where he kept his 
winter store, — the " beans with the weevil in 
them" and the ** potatoes with every third one 
nibbled by chipmunks," — is obliterated and 
overgrown with the glabrous sumach. His near- 
by field, where he learned to " know beans" and 
gathered relics of a previous and aboriginal race 
of bean-hoers, is covered by a growth of pines 
70 



The Walden of Thoreau 

and dwarf oaks, in places so dense as to be almost 
impassable. 

Some one has said, " Thoreau experienced 
Nature as other men experience religion." Cer- 
tainly the life at Walden, which he depicted in 
one of the most fascinating of books, was in all 
its details — whether he was ecstatically hoeing 
beans in his field or dreaming on his door-step, 
floating on the lake or rambling in forest and 
field — that of an ascetic and devout worshipper 
of Nature in all her moods. Thoreau " built 
himself in Walden woods a den'* in 1845, — after 
his return from tutoring in the family of Emer- 
son's brother at Staten Island ; here he wrote 
most of " Walden" and the " Week on the 
Concord and Merrimac Rivers," and much more 
that has been posthumously published ; from here 
he went to jail for refusing to pay a tax on his 
poll, from here he made the excursion described 
in " The Maine Woods." 

He finally removed from Walden in the autumn 
of 1 847, to reside in the house of Emerson dur- 
ing that sage's absence in Europe, An old neigh- 
bor of Thoreau's, who had often watched his 
** stumpy" figure as he hoed the beans, and had 
even once or twice assisted him in that celestial 
agriculture, tells us that Thoreau's hut was re- 
moved by a gardener to the middle of the bean- 
71 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

field and there occupied for some years. Later 
it was purchased by a farmer, who set it upon 
wheels and conveyed it to his farm some miles 
distant, where it has decayed and gone to 
pieces. 

In Concord it is not difficult to identify the 
personages associated with Thoreau's life at 
Walden Pond and referred to in his book. The 
** landlord and waterlord" of the domain, on 
which Thoreau was ** a squatter," was Waldo 
Emerson ; the owner of the axe which the her- 
mit borrowed to hew the frame of his hut was 
Bronson Alcott ; the " honorable raisers" of the 
structure were Emerson, Curtis the Nile " How- 
adji," Alcott, Hosmer, and others ; the lady 
who made the sketch of the hermitage which 
appears on the title-page of " Walden" was the 
author's sister Sophia. Of the hermit's visitors 
here, ** the one who came oftenest" was Emer- 
son ; " the one who came farthest" was also the 
poet whom the hermit " took to board for a 
fortnight," Ellery Channing ; the " long-headed 
farmer," who had " donned a frock instead of a 
professor's gown," was Thoreau's neighbor and 
life-long friend Edmund Hosmer, who is cele- 
brated in the poetry of Emerson and Channing ; 
the " last of the philosophers," the " Great 
Looker — great Expecter," who "first peddled 
7% 



The Walden of Thoreau 

wares and then his own brains," was Bronson 
Alcott, who spent long evenings here in converse 
with the hermit, or in listening to chapters from 
his manuscript. Here came Hawthorne to talk 
with his " cast-iron man" about trees and arrow- 
heads ; here came George Hilliard and James T. 
Fields, and others, — sometimes so many that the 
hut would scarce contain them ; the only com- 
plaint heard from Thoreau anent the narrow- 
ness of his quarters being that there was not 
room for the words to ricochet between him and 
his guests. Here, too, came humbler visitors, 
hunted slaves, who were never denied the shelter 
of the hermitage nor the sympathy and aid of 
the hermit. 

Another generation of visitors comes now to 
this spot, — pilgrims from far, like ourselves, to 
the shrine of a "stoic greater than Zeno or 
Xenophanes," — a man whose " breath and core 
was conscience." We linger till the twilight, 
for the genius of this shrine seems very near us 
as we muse in the place where he dwelt incar- 
nate alone with Nature, and there is for us a hint 
of his healthful spirit in the odor of his pines 
and of the wild flowers beside his path, — a vague 
whisper of his earnest, honest thought in the 
murmur of the clustering boughs and in the lap- 
ping of the wavelets upon the mimic strand. 
73 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

We bring from the shore a stone — the whitest 
we can find — for his cairn, and place with it a 
bright leaf, like those his callers in other days 
left for visiting cards upon his door-step, and then, 
through the wondrous half-lights of the summer 
evening, we walk silently away. 



74 



VIII 

THE HILL-TOP HEARSED 
WITH PINES 

Last Resting-Place of the Illustrious Concord Company - Their 
Graves beneath the Piny Boughs. 

TOURING Hawthorne's habitation of the 
-*-^ *' Old Manse" and his first residence at 
the Wayside, his favorite walk was to the 
"Sleepy Hollow," a beautifully diversified 
precinct of hill and vale which lies a little 
way eastward from the village. His habitual 
resting-place here was a pine-shaded hill-top 
where he often met Emerson, Thoreau, Bron- 
son Alcott, Elizabeth Hoar, Mrs. Ripley, or 
Margaret Fuller, — for all that sublimated com- 
pany loved and frequented this spot. More 
often Hawthorne lounged and mused or chatted 
here alone with his lovely wife. Their letters 
and journals of this period make frequent men- 
tion of the walks to this place and of " our 
castle," — a fanciful structure which, in their 
happy converse here under the pines, they 
planned to erect for their habitation on this 
hill-top. In their pleasant conceit, the terraced 
path which skirts the verge of the hollow and 
thence ascends the ridge was the grand " chariot- 
75 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

road" to their castle. This park has become a 
cemetery, — at its dedication Emerson made an 
oration and Frank B. Sanborn read a beautiful 
ode,— and on their beloved hill-top nearly all the 
transcendent company whom Hawthorne used 
to meet there, save Margaret Fuller who rests 
beneath the sea, lie at last in ** the dreamless 
sleep that lulls the dead." 

First came Thoreau, to lie among his kindred 
under the wild flowers and the fallen needles of 
his dear pines, in a grave marked now by a simple 
stone graven with his name and age. Next 
came Hawthorne : with his " half-told tale" and 
a wreath of apple-blossoms from the " Old 
Manse" resting on his coffin, and with Emerson, 
Longfellow, Fields, Ellery Channing, Agassiz, 
Hoar, Lowell, Whipple, Alcott, Holmes, and 
George Hilliard walking mournfully by his side, 
he was borne, through the flowering orchards 
and up the hill-side path, — which was to have 
been his *' chariot-road," — to a grave on the site 
of the " castle" of his fancy ; where his dearest 
friend Franklin Pierce covered him with flowers 
and James Freeman Clarke committed his mortal 
part to the lap of earth. Alas, that the beloved 
cohabitant of his dream-castle must lie in death 
a thousand leagues away ! in no dream of his 
would such a separation from her have seemed 
76 



The Hill-top Hearsed with Pines 

possible. She tried to mark his tomb by a leafy 
monument of hawthorn shrubbery, but the rig- 
orous climate prevented ; now a low marble, 
inscribed with the one word " Hawthorne," 
stands at either extremity of his grave, and a 
glossy growth of periwinkle covers the spot 
where sleeps the great master of American 
romance. Some smaller graves are beside his : 
in one lies a child of Julian Hawthorne ; in 
another. Rose — the daughter of Hawthorne's 
age— laid the son which her husband. Parsons 
Lathrop, commemorates in the lines of ** The 
Flown Soul." Next Mrs. Ripley and Elizabeth 
Hoar were borne to this " God's acre," and 
then Emerson — followed by a vast concourse 
and mourned by all the world — was brought to 
" give his body back to earth again," in this 
loved retreat, near Hawthorne and his own 
" forest-seer" Thoreau. A gigantic pine towers 
above him here, and a massive triangular boulder 
of untooled pink quartz — already marred by the 
vandalism of relic-seekers — is placed to mark the 
grave of the great " King of Thought." It bore 
no inscription or device of any sort until a few 
months ago, when a bronze plate inscribed with 
his name and years and the lines — 

** The passive master lent his hand 
To the vast soul that o'er him planned** — 

77 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

was set in the rough surface of the stone. By- 
Emerson lie his wife, his mother, two children 
of his son and biographer Dr. Emerson, and his 
own little child, — the " wondrous, deep-eyed 
boy" whom Emerson mourned in his matchless 
" Threnody." 

** O child of paradise, 
Boy who made dear his father's home, 
In whose deep eyes 

Men read the welfare of the times to come, — 
I am too much bereft.'* 

Six years after Emerson, Bronson Alcott and 
his illustrious daughter Louisa were laid here, 
within a few yards of Hawthorne and the rest, 
on a spot selected by the " Beth" of the Alcott 
books who was herself the first to be interred in 
it. Now all the " Little Women" repose here 
with their parents and good " John Brooke," — 
" Jo" being so placed as to suggest to her biog- 
rapher that she is still to take care of parents 
and sisters " as she had done all her life." 

No other spot of earth holds dust more pre- 
cious than does this " hill-top hearsed with 
pines." We are pleased to find the native 
beauty of the place little disturbed, — the trees, 
the indigenous grasses, ferns, and flowers remain- 
ing for the most part as they were known and 
78 



The Hill-top Hearsed with Pines 

loved by those who sleep beneath them. The 
contour of the ground and the foliage which 
clusters upon the slopes measurably shut out the 
view of other portions of the enclosure from 
this secluded hill-top, and, as we sit by the graves 
under the moaning pines, we seem to be alone 
with these our dead. Through the boughs we 
have glimpses of the motionless deeps of a sum- 
mer sky ; the patches of sunshine which illumine 
the graves about us are broken by foliate shadows 
sometimes as still as if painted upon the turf. 
No discordant sound from the haunts of men 
disturbs our meditations ; the silence is unbroken 
save by the frequent sighs of the mourning pines. 
As we linger, the pervading quiet becomes 
something more than mere silence, it acquires 
the air and sense of reserve : the impression is 
borne into our thought that these asleep here, 
who once freely gave us their richest and best, 
are withholding something from us now, — some 
newly-learned wisdom, some higher thought. 
Does " an awful spell bind them to silence," or 
are they vainly repeating to us in the tender 
monotone of the pines a message we cannot 
hear or cannot bear? Or have they ceased 
from all ken or care for earthly things? Do 
they no longer love this once beloved spot ? Do 
they not rejoice in the beauty of this summer 
79 



The Concord Pilgrimage 

day and the sunshine that falls upon their win- 
dowless palace ? Are they conscious of our 
reverent tread on the turf above them, of our 
low words of remembrance and affection ? Do 
they care that we have come from far to bend 
over them here ? 

" For knowledge of all these things, we must" 
— as the greatest of this transcendent circle once 
said — ** wait for to-morrow morning.'* 



80 



Jn and out of literary 

BOSTON 



In Boston 



Out of Boston 

I. Cambridge ; Elmwood, etc. 
II. Belmont; Wayside Inn; 
Homes of Whittier 

III. The Salem of Hawthorne; 

Whittier's Oak Knoll 

IV. Webster's Marsh-field ; Brook 

Farm and other Shrines 



IN BOSTON 



A Golden Age of Letters-Literary Associations-Isms-Clubs— 
Where Hester Prynne and Silas Lapham lived-The 
Corner Book-store- Home of Fields-Sargent-Hilliard- 
Aldrich-Deland-Parkman-Holmes-Howells — Moulton — 
Hale-Howe- Jane Austin^ etc. 

/^F the cisatlantic cities our "modern 
^^ Athens" is, to the literary pilgrim, the 
most interesting; for, whatever may be the 
claims of other cities to the present literary 
primacy, all must concede that Boston was long 
the intellectual capital of the continent and its 
centre of literary culture and achievement. If 
the pilgrim have attained to middle life and be 
loyal to the literary idols o^ his youth, his re- 
gard for the Boston of to-day must be largely 
reminiscential of a past that is rapidly becoming 
historic ; for, of the constellation of brilliant 
authors and thinkers who first gained for the 
place its pre-eminence in letters, few or none 
remain alive. The requirements of labor and 
trade are transforming the old streets ; the sedate 
and comfortable dwellings, once the abodes or 
the resorts of the litterateursy are giving place 
to palatial shops or great factories ; the neigh- 
borhood where Bancroft, Choate, Winthrop, 
Webster, and Edward Everett dwelt within a 
83 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

few rods of each other was long ago surren- 
dered to merchandise and mammon ; yet for us 
the busy scenes are haunted by memories and 
peopled by presences which the spirit of trade 
is powerless to exorcise. 

To tread the streets which have daily echoed 
the foot-falls of the illustrious company who 
created here a golden age of learning and cult- 
ure were alone a pleasure, but the city holds 
many closer and more personal mementos of 
her dead prophets, as well as the homes of a 
present generation who worthily strive to sustain 
her place and prestige. 

Interwoven with the older Boston are literary 
associations hardly less memorable and enduring 
than its history : in the belfry of its historic 
holy of holies — Old South Church — was the 
study of the historian Dr. Belknap, and the 
dove that nested beneath the church-bell is pre- 
served in the poetry of N, P. Willis; King's 
Chapel, the sanctuary where the beloved Dr. 
Holmes worshipped for so many years, and 
whence he was not long ago sadly borne to his 
burial, figures in the fiction of Fenimore Cooper ; 
historic Copp's Hill is also a scene in a tale of 
the same novelist ; the court-house occupies the 
site of the ** beetle-browed" prison of Hester 
Prynne of ** The Scarlet Letter ;'* the storied old 
H 



In Boston 

State-house marked the place of her pillory ; 
the theatre of the Boston Massacre is the scene 
of the thrilling episode of Hawthorne's " Gray- 
Champion ;" his " Legends of Province House" 
commemorate the ancient structure which stood 
nearly opposite the Old South Church ; the 
Tremont House, where the "Jacobins' Club" 
used to assemble with Ripley, Channing, Theo- 
dore Parker, Bronson Alcott, Peabody, and the 
extreme reformers, was the resort of Haw- 
thorne's " Miles Coverdale," as it was of the 
novelist himself, and on the street here he saw 
** ragamuffin Moodie" of " The Blithedale Ro- 
mance." On the site of Bowdoin School, 
Charles Sumner was born ; at one hundred and 
twenty Hancock Street he lived and composed 
the early orations which made his fame ; at num- 
ber one Exeter Place, Theodore Parker, the Vul- 
can of the New England pulpit, forged his bolts 
and wrote the " Discourses of Religion ;" in Es- 
sex Street lived and wrote Wendell Phillips, at 
thirty-seven Common Street he died ; at thirty- 
one Hollis Street the gifted Harriet Martineau 
was the guest of Francis Jackson ; at the corner 
of Congress and Water Streets Lloyd Garrison 
wrote and published " The Liberator." In this 
older city, antedating the luxury of the Back 
Bay district of the new Boston, Mather wrote 
85 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

the " Magnalia," Paine sang his songs, Allston 
composed his tales, Buckminster wrote his homi- 
lies, Bowditch translated La Place's " Mecanique 
celeste.^'' Here Emerson, Motley, Parkman, 
and Poe were born ; here Bancroft lived. Combe 
wrote, Spurzheim died. Plere Maffit, Chan- 
ning, and Pierpont preached ; Agassiz, Phillips, 
and Lyell lectured; Alcott, Elizabeth Peabody, 
and Fuller taught. Here Sargent wrote " Deal- 
ings with the Dead," Sprague his " Curiosity," 
Prescott his " Ferdinand and Isabella ;" here 
Margaret Fuller held the " Conversations" which 
attracted and impressed the leading spirits of the 
time, and Bronson Alcott favored elect circles 
with his Orphic and oracular utterances ; here 
lived Melvill, pictured in Holmes's " Last Leaf;'* 
here Emerson preached Unitarianism ** until he 
had carried it to the jumping-off-place," as one of 
his quondam parishioners avers, and here com- 
menced his career as philosopher and lecturer. 
Here, besides those above mentioned, Dwight, 
Brisbane, Quincy, Ripley, Graham, Thompson, 
Hovey, Loring, Miller, Mrs. Folsom, and others 
of similar ability or zeal, discoursed and wrote 
in advocacy of the various reforms and ** isms" 
in vogue half a century or more ago. 

It has been said that, according to the local 
creed, whoso is born in Boston needs not to be 
86 



In Boston 

born again, but some decades ago a literary- 
prowler, like ourselves, discovered that "no- 
body is born in Boston," the people w^ho have 
made its fame in letters and art being usually 
allured to it from other places. This is true in 
less degree of the present age, since Hale, 
Robert Grant, Ballou, — of "The Pearl of 
India," — Bates, Guiney, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, 
and others are " to the manor born ;" but, if Bos- 
ton has few birthplaces, she cherishes the homes 
and haunts of two generations of adult intel- 
lectual giants. 

Prominent among the literary landmarks is 
the " Corner Book-store" — once the shop of 
the father of Dr. Clarke — at School and Wash- 
ington Streets, which, like Murray's in London, 
has long been the rendezvous of the litterateurs. 
Here appeared the first American edition of 
" The Opium Eater" and of Tennyson's poems. 
Here was the early home of the " Atlantic," 
then edited by James T. Fields, who was the 
literary partner of the firm and the presiding 
genius of the old store. This lover of letters 
and sympathetic friend of literary men — always 
kind of heart and generous of hand — drew to 
him here the foremost of that galaxy who first 
achieved for America a place in the world of 
letters. To this literary Rialto, as familiar 
87 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

loungers, came in that golden age George Hil- 
liard, Emerson, Ticknor, Saxe, Whipple, Long- 
fellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Agassiz, the " Auto- 
crat," and the rest, to loiter among and discuss 
the new books, or, more often, to chat with their 
friend Fields at his desk, in the nook behind the 
green baize curtain. The store is altered some 
since Fields left it ; the curtained back-corner, 
which was the domain of the Celtic urchin 
" Michael Angelo" and the trysting spot of the 
literary fraternity, has given place to shelves 
of shining books. The side entrance — used 
mostly by the authors because it brought them 
more directly to Fields's desk and den — is re- 
placed by a window which looks out upon the 
spot where, as we remember with a thrill. 
Fields last shook Hawthorne's hand and stood 
looking after him as — faltering with weakness — 
he walked up this side street with Pierce to 
start upon the journey from which he never 
returned. 

Literary tourists come to the store as to a 
shrine : thus in later years Matthew Arnold, 
Cable, Edmund Gosse, Professor Drummond, 
Dr. Doyle, and others like them, have visited the 
old corner. Nor is it deserted by the authors 
of the day ; Holmes was often here up to the 
time of his death, and the visitor may still see, 
88 



In Boston 

turning the glossy pages, some who are writers 
as well as readers of books : Thomas Bailey 
Aldrich, Scudder, Alger, Robert Grant, — whose 
" Reflections" and " Opinions" have been so 
widely read, — Miss Winthrop, Miss Jewett, 
Mrs. Louise Chandler Moulton, and Mrs. Coffin 
are among those who still come to the familiar 
place. Near by, in Washington Street, Haw- 
thorne's first romance, " Fanshawe," was pub- 
lished in 1828. From Fields's famous store 
the transition to the staid old mansion which 
was long his home, and in which his widow still 
lives, is easy and natural. We find it pleasantly 
placed below the western slope of Beacon Hill, 
overlooking an enchanting prospect of blue 
waters and sunset skies. It is one of those 
dignified, substantial, and altogether comfortable 
dwellings — with spacious rooms, wide halls, 
easy stairways, and generous fireplaces — which 
we inherit from a previous generation. Here 
Fields, hardly less famed as an author than as 
the friend of authors, and his gifted wife — who 
is still a charming writer — created in their beau- 
tiful home an atmosphere which attracted to it 
the best and highest of their kind, and made it 
what it has been for more than forty years, a 
centre and ganglion of literary life and interest. 
The old-fashioned rooms are aglow with most 
89 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

precious memories and teem with artistic and 
literary treasures, many of them being souvenirs 
of the illustrious authors whom the Fields have 
numbered among their friends and guests. The 
letters of Dickens, Hawthorne, Emerson, and 
others reveal the quality of the hospitality of 
this house and show how it was prized by its 
recipients. For years this was the Boston home 
of Hawthorne ; to it came Emerson, Longfellow, 
and Whittier almost as freely as to their own 
abodes ; here Holmes, Lowell, Charles Sumner, 
Greene, Bayard Taylor, Joseph Jefferson, were 
frequent guests ; and here we see a quaintly 
furnished bedchamber which has at various 
times been occupied by Dickens, Trollope, 
Arthur Clough, Thackeray, Charles Kingsley, 
Matthew Arnold, Charlotte Cushman, and others 
of equal fame. Of the delights of familiar inter- 
course with the starry spirits who frequented this 
house, of their brilliant discussions of men and 
books, their scintillations of wit, their sage and 
sober words of wisdom, Mrs. Annie Fields 
affords but tantalizing hints in her reminiscences 
and the glimpses she occasionally allows us of 
her husband's diary and letters. Fields's library 
on the second floor — described as ** My Friend's 
Library" — is a most alluring apartment, where 
we see, besides the " Shelf of Old Books" of 



In Boston 

which Mrs. Fields gives such a sympathetic ac- 
count, other shelves containing numerous curious 
and uniquely precious volumes, — among them 
the few hundreds of worn and much annotated 
books which constituted the library of Leigh 
Hunt. In this room Emerson, while awaiting 
breakfast, wrote one of his poems, to which the 
hostess gave title. 

In later years a younger generation of writers 
came to this mansion : Celia Thaxter was a 
frequent guest ; the princess-like Sarah Orne 
Jewett, beloved by Whittier as a daughter, has 
made it her Boston home ; Aldrich comes to see 
the widow of his friend ; Miss Preston, Mrs. 
Ward, and other luminous spirits may be met 
among the company who assemble in these 
memory-haunted rooms. For several years 
Holmes lived in the same street, within a few 
doors of Fields's house. 

At number fifty-four in quaint Pinckney Street, 
around the corner from Mrs. Fields's and near 
the former residence of Aldrich, we find the 
house in which the brilliant George Hilliard 
lived and died, scarcely changed since the time 
James Freeman Clarke here married Hawthorne 
to the lovely Sophia Peabody. 

Upon the opposite side, at number eleven, 
dwells Mrs. E. P. Whipple, widow of the emi- 
91 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

nent author and critic, — herself a lady of refined 
critical tastes, — who keeps unchanged the home 
in which her husband died. In his lifetime a 
select circle of friends usually assembled here 
on Sunday evenings, — a circle in which Fields, 
Bronson Alcott, Lowell, Emerson, Longfellow, 
Holmes, Sumner, Clarke, Dr. Bartol, Ole Bull, 
Lucretia Hale, Edwin Booth, and others of simi- 
lar eminence in letters or art were included. 
Just around the corner, in Louisburg Square, 
Bronson Alcott died in the house of his daughter 
Mrs. Pratt, — the " Meg" of Louisa Alcott's 
books. 

On Beacon Hill, in the next — Mount Vernon 
— street, we find near the ** hub of the Hub" 
a tall, deep-roomed dwelling, surmounted by an 
observatory which commands a charming view 
of the city and its environs, and this is the ele- 
gant city home of the poet, novelist, and prince 
of conversationalists, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. 
His library, full of treasures, is on a lower floor, 
but the study in which he pens his delightful 
compositions is high above the distractions of 
the world. As one sees the author of " Mar- 
jorie Daw" and the recent " Unguarded Gates" 
among his books, there is no hint of his sixty years 
in his fresh, ruddy face, with its carefully waxed 
moustache, nor in his sprightly speech and manner. 
92 



In Boston 

In the same street, the spacious mansion of 
ex-Governor Claflin was long a resort of a wise, 
earnest, and dazzling company of sublimated in- 
tellects. This house was in later years the usual 
haven of Whittier, the gentle Quaker bard, during 
his visits to Boston ; and here, protected by the 
hostess from the eager kindness of his numerous 
friends, he spent many restful days when rest 
was most needed. 

Near by, on the same hill-side, the talented 
authoress of "John Ward, Preacher" inhabits a 
many-windowed home of sober brick. Within, 
we find everywhere evidences of the fastidious 
personality of Mrs. Margaret Deland. In her 
parlors are dainty articles of furniture and bric- 
a-brac, wide fireplaces, deep windows full of 
flowers, many pictures, many more books. In 
her study and work-room, her desk stands near 
another fireplace, about it are still more flowers, 
pictures and books galore ; here, not long ago, 
that tragedy of selfishness — " Philip and His 
Wife" — was written. 

At the sumptuous home of the Sargents in 
the adjoining street have been held some of the 
seances of the noted Radical Club, in which, as 
Mrs. Moulton says, ** somebody read a paper 
and everybody else pulled it to pieces." At 
these sessions such spirits as Emerson, Bronson 
93 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

Alcott, Holmes, Edward Everett Hale, Carl 
Schurz, the genial Colonel Higginson, the serene 
James Freeman Clarke, the mystic Dr. Bartol, — 
who still lives in retirement in his old home, — 
and other representatives of advanced thought have 
discussed the ethics of life as well as of letters. 

A plain brick house of three stories in the 
same quiet street was the abode of Francis Park- 
man*s sister, where, after the death of his wife, 
the historian spent his winters, his study here 
being a simple front room on the upper floor, 
with open fireplace and book-lined walls. 

In Park Street, above the Common, the ample 
mansion of George Ticknor — the chronicler of 
" Spanish Literature" and the autocrat of liter- 
ary taste — was during many years a haunt of the 
best of Boston culture. We find its stately 
walls still standing, but the interior has been sur- 
rendered to the Philistines. 

On Beacon Street, but a door or two removed 
from the birthplace of Wendell Phillips, in a 
house whose number the poet-lover said he 
"remembered by thinking of the Thirty-Nine 
Articles," Longfellow won Miss Appleton to 
be his wife. Just across the Common, in Carver 
Street, Hawthorne's son was born. 

At many of the homes here mentioned were 
held the assemblages of the Ladies* Social Club, 
94 



In Boston 

Among its readers were Agassiz, Emerson, 
Greene, Whipple, Clarke, and E. E. Hale. It 
was ironically styled the " Brain Club," and 
died after many years because, according to one 
ex-member, " the newer members brought into 
it too much Supper and Stomach and no Brain 
at all." A successor has been the Round Table 
Club, with Colonel Higginson for first president, 
— its meetings for essays and discussions being 
held in the homes of its literary or artistic 
members. 

Boston's Belgravia occupies a district which 
has been reclaimed from the waters of the 
" Back Bay" of the Charles River, — on whose 
shore Hawthorne placed the shunned and iso- 
lated thatched cottage of Hester Prynne in 
" The Scarlet Letter," and the windows of many 
of Boston's Four Hundred overlook the same 
delightful vista of water, hills, and western skies 
which to the sad eyes of Hester and little Pearl 
were a daily vision. On the water side of 
Beacon Street, within this select region, is the 
four-floored, picturesque mansion of brick — its 
front embellished with a growth of ivy which 
clusters about the bay-windows — where not 
long ago we found the gentle and genial Holmes 
sitting among his books, serene in the golden 
sunset of life, happy in the love of friends and 
95 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

in the benedictions of the thousands his work 
has uplifted and beatified. The mansion is red- 
olent of literary associations, and throughout its 
apartments were tastefully disposed articles of 
virtu, curios, and mementos — literary, artistic, or 
historic— of affection and regard from Holmes's 
many friends at home and abroad. His study 
was a large room at the back of the house, occu- 
pying the entire width of the second floor. Its 
broad window commands a sweep of the Charles, 
with its tides and its many craft, beyond which 
the poet could see, as he said, Cambridge where 
he was born. Harvard where he was educated, 
and Mount Auburn where he expected to lie in 
his last sleep. We last saw the " Autocrat" in his 
easy-chair, among the treasures of this apart- 
ment, with a portrait of his ancestress " Doro- 
thy Q" looking down at him from a side wall. 
His hair was silvered and his kindly face had 
lost its smoothness, — for he was eighty-five 
" years young," as he would say, — but his facul- 
ties were keen and alert, and, in benign age, his 
greeting was no less cordial and his outlook upon 
men and affairs was no less cheery and optimistic 
than in the flush and vigor of early manhood. 
In this luxurious study were written several of 
his twenty-five volumes, — *' Over the Teacups" 
being the most popular of those produced here, 
96 



In Boston 

— and we found him still devoting some hours 
of each day to light literary tasks, oftenest dic- 
tating materials for his memoirs, which are yet 
to be published. 

Above the study, and overlooking the river 
on which he used to row and the farther green 
hills, is the chamber immortalized in ** My 
Aviary ;" and here, as he sat in his favorite 
chair, surrounded by his family, death came to 
him, and his spirit peacefully passed into the 
eternal silence. Then the " Last Leaf" had 
fallen, to be mourned by all the world. 

A door or two from Holmes sometime dwelt 
the versatile novelist, poet, playwright, and 
" Altrurian Traveller." A popular print of 
'* Howells in his Library" is an interior of his 
Beacon Street house ; the view of the glassy 
river-basin, with the roofs and spires of Cam- 
bridge rising from banks and bowers of foliage 
beyond, — which he pictures from the new house 
of " Silas Lapham" on this street, — is the one 
Howells daily beheld from his study window 
here. His latest Boston home was in the same 
district on the superb Commonwealth Avenue, 
near the statue of Garrison, and here, in a sump- 
tuous, six-storied, bow-fronted mansion, he wrote 
" The Shadow of a Dream" and other widely 
read books. 

G 97 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

A modest, old-fashioned house on Beacon 
Street has long been the home of the poet and 
starry genius Julia Ward Howe, writer of the 
** Battle-Hymn of the Republic." Other mem- 
bers of her singularly gifted family have so- 
journed here, and the "home of the Howes" 
has been frequented by men and women eminent 
for culture and thought and for achievement in 
literature or art. 

In the adjacent Marlborough Street recently 
died the polished author and orator Robert C. 
Winthrop, and here, too, was the home of Dr. 
Ellis, the friend of Lowell's father. 

Farther away in this newer Boston of luxury and 
culture is the charming and hospitable home of 
the poet, essayist, novelist, and critic Mrs. Louise 
Chandler Moulton, whose Amer'.can admirers 
complain that in late years she remains too 
much in London. When at home, she inhabits 
a delightful dwelling which, from entrance to 
attic, teems with pictures, rare books, curios, and 
other souvenirs of her many friends in many lands. 
In her library, where much of ** Garden of 
Dreams," " Swallow Flights," and other books 
was written, and where more of all *' the work 
nearest her heart" was accomplished, are pre- 
served many autograph copies of books by re- 
cent writers — several of them dedicated to Mrs. 
98 



In Boston 

Moulton — and a priceless colkction of letters 
from illustrious literary workers. In her draw- 
ing-rooms one may meet many of the famed 
authors of the day, — Higginson, Wendell, Hors- 
ford, Bynner, Nora Perry of the charming 
books for girls. Miss Conway, Miss Louise Imo- 
gen Guiney, Mrs. Howe, Arlo Bates, Adams, 
the jocosely serious Robert Grant, and others 
of Boston's newer lights of literature. 

If we ** drive on down Washington Street" with 
<* Silas Lapham," we shall find in Chester Square 
the " Nankeen Square'* where he dwelt in his 
less ambitious days, and the pretty oval green 
with the sturdy trees which the worthy colonel 
saw grow from saplings. 

In a pleasant dwelling on the contiguous street 
lives and works the bright and busy Lucretia P. 
Hale, sister of the author-divine. She was the 
favorite scholar of Miss Elizabeth Peabody ; and 
she has, through her writings and her classes, 
acquired an influence and discipleship little 
smaller than that which Margaret Fuller once 
possessed. 

Farther south, in the Roxbury district, we 
seek the abode of the famed author of " The 
Man without a Country." Sauntering along 
the shady and delectable Highland Street, we 
interrogate a uniformed guardian of the law, who 
99 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

heartily rejoins, " Dr. Hale's is a temple on 
the right a block further on : and if any man's 
fit to live in a temple, it's him." As we walk the 
** block further on" we think that, however de- 
fective his grammar, the policeman's estimate of 
Hale is beyond criticism and agrees with that of 
the thousands of readers and friends of the in- 
defatigable author, lecturer, preacher, editor, 
reformer, and promoter of all good. We find 
the house — very like a Greek temple — standing 
back from the street in the midst of an ample 
lawn, shaded by noble trees and decked with a 
wealth of shrubbery and bloom. The mansion 
is a large square edifice, with great dormer-win- 
dows in its roofs, surmounted by a cupola, and 
having in front a lofty portico upheld by heavy 
Ionic pillars, between which interlacing wood- 
bine forms a leafy screen. Within is a wide 
hall, and opening out of it are generously pro- 
portioned rooms, some of them lined from floor 
to ceiling with thousands of books. The study 
is a commodious room, with a ** pamphlet- 
annex" adjoining it on the garden side, and is 
crammed with book-shelves and drawers, while 
piles of books, magazines, portfolios, manu- 
scripts, and memoranda are disposed on cases, 
tables, and stands about the apartment. Every- 
thing is obviously arranged for convenient and 



In Boston 

ready use, and well it may be so, for this is the 
work-room and " thinking-shop" of the hardest- 
working literary man in America. The books 
which made his first fame were written before 
he came to this house ; of all the works pro- 
duced in this study, the numerous poems, ro- 
mances, histories, essays, editorials, reviews, dis- 
cussions, translations, — to say nothing of the 
many hundreds of well-considered and carefully 
written sermons, — we may not here mention 
even the names, for no writer since Voltaire is 
more fruitful of finished and masterly work. It 
is notable that Hale regards " In His Name" as 
his best work from a literary point of view ; of 
his other productions, he thinks some of the 
poems of the latest collection, " For Fifty 
Years," as good as anything, — " always except- 
ing his sermons." Among the abundant treas- 
ures of his study. Hale has a most interesting 
and valuable collection of autograph letters, of 
which he is justly proud. His father was 
Nathan Hale of the Boston " Advertiser," his 
mother was sister to Edward Everett and herself 
an author and translator, his wife is niece to 
Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, his son Robert has 
already acquired a reputation in the domain of 
letters. The doctor himself has been a writer 
from childhood, his earliest contributions being 

lOI 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

to his father's paper. His illustrious sister de- 
clares that in their nursery days she and her 
brother used to take their meals with the " Ad- 
vertiser" pinned under their chins, — a practice 
to which their literary precocity has been at- 
tributed. We find Hale at the age of seventy- 
three blithe and hopeful, working as much and 
manifestly accomplishing more than ever before. 
A little farther out on the same street is the 
dwelling where William Lloyd Garrison spent his 
last years, and in this neighborhood lived Mrs. 
Blake, poet of " Verses Along the Way." Here 
also are the early home of Miss Guiney and the 
school to which she was first sent, — or rather 
" carried neck and heels," because she refused 
to walk. Close by we find the pleasant home 
in which Jane G. Austin wrote some of her 
famed colonial tales and where she died not 
many months ago ; and in the same delightful 
suburb, a half-mile beyond Hale's house, is the 
retreat where the beloved author of ** Little 
Women" breathed out her too brief life. 



OUT OF BOSTON 

I 

CAMBRIDGE: ELMWOOD: 

MOUNT AUBURN 

Holmes's Church-yard-Bridge^ Smithy ^ Chapel^ and River of 
Longfelloiv'' s Verse-Abodes of Lettered Culture-Holmes- 
Higginson - Agassiz - Norton - Clough-Hoivells-Fuller- 
Longfelloiu-Loivell - Longfelloiv'' s City of the Dead 
and its Precious Graves. 

/CROSSING the Charles by " The Bridge" 
of Longfellow's popular poem, a stroll 
along elm-shaded streets brings us to the an- 
cient Common of Cambridge and a vicinage 
which has much besides its historic traditions 
to allure the literary pilgrim. For centuries 
the site of a celebrated college and a conspic- 
uous centre of learning, it has long been the 
abiding-place of representatives of the best and 
foremost in American culture and mental achieve- 
ment. 

Close by the Common, and opposite the re- 
mains of the elm beneath which Washington 
assumed the command of the patriot army, stood 
the old gambrel-roofed house in which that 
" gentlest of autocrats," Holmes, was born and 
reared, and upon whose door-post was first dis- 
103 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

played his *' shingle," on which he whimsically 
proposed to inscribe " The Smallest Fevers 
Thankfully Received ;" across the college grounds 
is the home-like edifice where lived the erudite 
Professor Felton, loved by Dickens and oft men- 
tioned in his letters ; not far away, at the corner 
of Broadway, was the home of Agassiz, since 
occupied by his son ; and a few rods eastward 
is the picturesque residence of the witty and 
profound Colonel Higginson, — poet, essayist, 
novelist, and reformer. In the adjacent Kirk- 
land Street dwelt the delightful Dr. Estes Howe, 
brother-in-law to Lowell, with whom the poet 
sometime lived and whom he celebrated as " the 
Doctor" in the " Fable for Critics." Dr. C. C. 
Abbott formerly lived in this neighborhood, and 
the collections on which his best-known books 
are founded are preserved in the near-by Pea- 
body Museum, beyond which we find the taste- 
ful abode of Professor Charles Eliot Norton, the 
friend and literary executor of Lowell. Near 
the Common, too, dwelt for a year or so that 
rare poet Arthur Clough, author of " The 
Bothie" and " Qua Cursum Ventus ;" and the 
sweet singer Charlotte Fiske Bates — the intimate 
friend of Longfellow — had her habitation in the 
same neighborhood. Opposite the southern end 
of the Common is the ancient village cemetery 
104 



Cambridge 

celebrated in the poetry of Holmes and Long- 
fellow ; a little way westward, Howells lived 
in a delightful rose-embowered cottage and 
pleasantly pictured many features of the old 
town in the " Charlesbridge" of his " Suburban 
Sketches." Two or three furlongs distant, 
within the grounds of the Botanic Garden, long 
lived the American Linnaeus, Professor Asa 
Gray. 

Of all the Cambridge thoroughfares, the shady 
and venerable Brattle Street, which curves west- 
ward from the University Press, is most interest- 
ing and attractive. Near the Press building 
stands the historic Brattle House, — its beautiful 
stairway and other antique features preserved by 
the Social Club, to whom the property now 
belongs, — where Margaret Fuller, the priestess 
and queen of modern Transcendentalism, passed 
much of her youth and young womanhood, and 
where her sister, wife to the poet Ellery Chan- 
ning, was reared. Margaret, who is said to 
have stood for the Theodora of Beaconsfield's 
" Lothair," first saw the light in a modest little 
dwelling in Main Street nearer the Boston bridge, 
and here attended school with Holmes and 
Richard Henry Dana ; but it was in this Brattle 
House that her marvellous, and in some respects 
unique, intellectual career commenced. Here 
los 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

she acquired the moral and mental equipment 
which fitted her for leadership in the most vital 
epoch of American culture and thought, and 
here she attracted and attached all the wisest and 
noblest spirits within her range. To her here 
came Theodore Parker, the older Channing, 
Harriet Martineau, James Freeman Clarke, — the 
earnest, brilliant, and thoughtful of all ages and 
conditions. One noble soul who knew her here 
speaks of her friendship as a "gift of the gods," 
and some eminent in thought and achievement 
testify that they have ever striven toward stand- 
ards set up for them by her in that early period 
of her residence here. 

Close by Miss Fuller's home, " under a 
spreading chestnut-tree" at the intersection of 
Story Street, stood the smithy of Pratt, who was 
immortalized by Longfellow as " The Village 
Blacksmith." To the poet, passing daily on the 
way between his home and the college, the 
" mighty man" at his anvil in the shaded smithy 
was long a familiar vision. The tree — a horse- 
chestnut — has been removed, the shop has given 
place to a modern dwelling, an.d years ago the 
worthy smith rejoined his wife, " singing in 
Paradise." 

A few steps westward from the site of the 
smithy is the " Chapel of St. John" of another 
io6 



Cambridge 

sweet poem of Longfellow ; and just beyond 
this we find, bowered by lilacs and environed 
by acres of shade and sward, the colonial Cragie 
House, once the sojourn of Washington, but 
holding for us more precious associations, since 
Sparks, Worcester, and Everett have lived within 
its time-honored walls, and our popular poet of 
grace and sentiment for near half a century here 
had his home, and from here passed into the un- 
known. The picturesque mansion wears the 
aspect of an old acquaintance, and the interior, 
with its princely proportioned rooms, spacious 
fireplaces, wide halls, curious carvings and tiles, 
has much that Longfellow has shared with his 
readers. On the entrance door is the ponderous 
knocker ; a landing of the broad stairway holds 
" The Old Clock on the Stairs ;" at the right of 
the hall is the study, with its priceless memen- 
tos of the tender and sympathetic bard who 
wrought here the most and best of his life-work, 
from early manhood onward into the mellow 
twilight of sweet and benign age. Here is his 
chair, vacated by him but a few days before he 
died ; his desk ; his inkstand which had been 
Coleridge's ; his pen with its " link from the 
chain of Bonnivard ;" the antique pitcher of his 
" Drinking Song ;" the fireplace of " The Wind 
over the Chimney ;" the arm-chair carved from 
107 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

the " spreading chestnut-tree" of the smithy, 
which was presented to him by the village chil- 
dren and celebrated in his poem " From my 
Arm-Chair." About us here are his cherished 
books, his pictures, his manuscripts, all his 
precious belongings, and from his window we 
see, beyond the Longfellow Memorial Park, the 
river so often sung in his verse, " stealing on- 
ward, like the stream of life." In this room 
Washington held his war councils. Of the many 
intellectual seances its walls have witnessed we 
contemplate with greatest pleasure the Wednes- 
day evening meetings of the " Dante Club," 
when Lowell, Howells, Fields, Norton, Greene, 
and other friends and scholars sat here with 
Longfellow to revise the new translation of 
Dante. 

The book-lined apartment over the study — 
once the bedchamber of Washington and later 
of Talleyrand — was occupied by Longfellow 
when he first lived as a lodger in the old house. 
It was here he heard " Footsteps of Angels" 
and " Voices of the Night," and saw by the 
fitful firelight the " Being Beauteous" at his side ; 
here he wrote " Hyperion" and the earlier 
poems which made him known and loved in 
every clime. Later this room became the nur- 
sery of his children, and some of the grotesque 
io8 



Cambridge 

tiles which adorn its chimney are mentioned in 
his poem " To a Child ;" 

** The lady with the gay macaw, 
The dancing-girl, the grave bashaw, 
The Chinese mandarin.'* 

Along the western facade of the mansion stretches 
a wide veranda, where the poet was wont to 
take his daily exercise when " the goddess Neu- 
ralgia" or " the two Ws" (Work and Weather) 
prevented his walking abroad. In this stately 
old house his children were born and reared, 
here his wife met her tragic death, and here his 
daughter— th.e " grave Alice" of " The Chil- 
dren's Hour" — abides and preserves its precious 
relics, while " laughing Allegra" (Anna) and 
" Edith with golden hair" — now Mrs. Dana 
and Mrs. Thorp — have dwellings within the 
grounds of their childhood home, and their 
brother Ernst owns a modern cottage a few rods 
westward on the same street. 

In Sparks Street, just out of Brattle, dwelt 
the author Robert Carter, — familiarly, " The 
Don," — sometime secretary to Prescott and 
long the especial friend of Lowell, with whom 
he was associated in the editorship of the short- 
lived *' Pioneer." Carter's home here was the 
rendezvous of a circle of choice spirits, where 
109 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

one might often meet " Prince" Lowell, — as his 
friends delighted to call him, — Bartlett of " Fa- 
miliar Quotations," and that " songless poet" 
John Holmes, brother of the " American Mon- 
taigne." 

A short walk under the arching elms of Brat- 
tle Street brings us to Elmwood, the life-long 
home of Lowell. The house, erected by the 
last British lieutenant-governor of the province, 
is a plain, square structure of wood, three stories 
in height, and is surrounded by a park of simple 
and natural beauty, whose abundant growth of 
trees gives to some portions of the grounds the 
sombreness and apparent seclusion of a forest. 
A gigantic hedge of trees encloses the place like 
a leafy wall, excluding the vision of the world 
and harboring thousands of birds who tenant its 
shades. Some of the aquatic fowl of the vici- 
nage are referred to in Longfellow*s " Herons of 
Elmwood." In the old mansion, long the home 
of Elbridge Gerry, Lowell was born and grew 
to manhood, and to it he brought the bride of 
his youth, the lovely Maria White, herself the 
writer of some exquisite poems ; here, a few 
years later, she died in the same night that a 
child was born to Longfellow, whose poem 
" The Two Angels" commemorates both events. 
Here, too, Lowell lost his children one by one 
no 



Elmwood 

until a daughter, the present Mrs. Burnett, — 
now owner and occupant of Elmwood, — alone 
remained. During the poet's stay abroad, his 
house was tenanted by Mrs. Ole Bull and by 
Lowell's brother-bard Bailey Aldrich, who in 
this sweet retirement wrought some of his de- 
licious work. To the beloved trees and birds 
of his old home Lowell returned from his em- 
bassage, and here, with his daughter, he passed 
his last years among his books and a chosen cir- 
cle of friends. Here, where he wished to die, he 
died, and here his daughter preserves his former 
home and its contents unchanged since he was 
borne hence to his burial. Until the death of 
his father, Lowell's study was an upper front 
room at the left of the entrance. It is a plain, 
low-studded corner apartment, which the poet 
called " his garret," and where he slept as a boy. 
Its windows now look only into the neighboring 
trees, but when autumn has shorn the boughs of 
their foliage the front window commands a wide 
level of the sluggish Charles and its bordering 
lowlands, while the side window overlooks the 
beautiful slopes of Mount Auburn, where Lowell 
now lies with his poet-wife and the children 
who went before. His study windows suggested 
the title of his most interesting volume of prose 
essays. In this upper chamber he wrote his 
III 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

'* Conversations on the Poets" and the early 
poems which made his fame, — ** Irene," " Pro- 
metheus," " Rhoecus," " Sir Launfal," — which 
was composed in five days, — and the first series 
of that collection of grotesque drolleries, " The 
Biglow Papers." Here also he prepared his 
editorial contributions to the *' Atlantic." His 
later study was on the lower floor, at the left of 
the ample hall which traverses the centre of the 
house. It is a prim and delightful old-fashioned 
apartment, with low walls, a wide and cheerful 
fireplace, and pleasant windows which look out 
among the trees and lilacs upon a long reach of 
lawn. In this room the poet's best-loved books, 
copiously annotated by his hand, remain upon 
his shelves ; here we see his table, his accus- 
tomed chair, the desk upon which he wrote the 
<* Commemoration Ode," " Under the Wil- 
lows," and many famous poems, besides the 
volumes of prose essays. In this study he 
sometimes gathered his classes in Dante, and to 
him here came his friends familiarly and in- 
formally, — for *' receptions" were rare at Elm- 
wood : most often came ** The Don," " The 
Doctor," Norton, Owen, Bartlett, Felton, Still- 
man, — less frequently Godkin, Fields, Holmes, 
Child, Motley, Edmund Quincy, and the his- 
torian Parkman. 



Mount Auburn 

While the older trees of the place were planted 
by Gerry, the pines and clustering lilacs were 
rooted by Lowell or his father. All who re- 
member the poet's passionate love for this home 
will rejoice in the assurance that the old man- 
sion, with its precious associations and memen- 
tos, and the acres immediately adjoining it, will 
not be in any way disturbed during the life 
of his daughter and her children. At most, 
the memorial park which has been planned 
by the literary people of Boston and Cambridge 
will include only that portion of the grounds 
which belonged to the poet's brothers and 
sisters. 

A narrow street separates the hedges of Elm- 
wood from the peaceful shades of Mount Auburn, 
— the ** City of the Dead" of Longfellow's son- 
net, Lowell thought this the most delightful 
spot on earth. The late Francis Parkman told 
the writer that Lowell, in his youth, had con- 
fided to him that he habitually went into the 
cemetery at midnight and sat upon a tombstone, 
hoping to find there the poetic afflatus. He 
confessed he had not succeeded, and was warned 
by his friend that the custom would bring him 
more rheumatism than inspiration. Dr. Ellis 
testified that at this period his friend Dr. Lowell 
often expressed to him his anxiety " lest his son 

H 113 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

James would amount to nothing, because he had 
taken to writing poetry.'* 

In the sanctuary of Mount Auburn we find 
many of the names mentioned in these chapters, 
— names written on the scroll of fame, blazoned 
on title-pages, borne in the hearts of thousands 
of readers in all lands, — now, alas ! inscribed 
above their graves. From the eminence of Mount 
Auburn, we look upon Longfellow's river ** steal- 
ing with silent pace" around the sacred en- 
closure ; the verdant meads along the stream ; 
the distant cities, erst the abodes of those who 
sleep about us here, — for whom life's fever is 
ended and life's work done. Near this summit, 
Charlotte Cushman rests at the base of a tall 
obelisk, her favorite myrtle growing dense and 
dark above her. By the elevated Ridge Path, 
on a site long ago selected by him, Longfellow 
lies in a grave decked with profuse flowers and 
marked by a monument of brown stone. On 
Fountain Avenue we find a beautiful spot, shaded 
by two giant trees, which was a beloved resort 
of Lowell, and where he now lies among his kin- 
dred, his sepulchre marked by a simple slab of 
slate : ** Good-night, sweet Prince !" Not far 
away is the beautiful Jackson plot, where not 
long ago the beloved Holmes was tenderly laid 
in the same grave with his wife beneath a burden 
114 



Mount Auburn 

of flowers. Some of the blossoms we lately 
saw upon this grave were newly placed by 
the creator of " Micah Clarke" and " Sherlock 
Holmes," Dr. Conan Doyle. By a great oak 
near the main avenue is the sarcophagus of Sum- 
ner, and one shady slope bears the memorial 
of Margaret Fuller and her husband, — buried 
beneath the sea on the coast of Fire Island, 
Near by we find the grave of " Fanny Fern," — 
wife of Parton and sister of N. P. Willis, — with 
its white cross adorned with exquisitely carved 
ferns ; the pillar of granite and marble which 
designates the resting-place of Everett; the 
granite boulder — its unchiselled surface over- 
grown with the lichens he loved — which covers 
the ashes of Agassiz; the simple sarcophagus 
of Rufus Choate ; the cenotaph of Kirkland ; 
the tomb of Spurzheim; and on the lovely 
slopes about us, under the dreaming trees, amid 
myriad witcheries of bough and bloom, are the 
enduring memorials of affection beneath which 
repose the mortal parts of Sargent, Quincy, 
Story, Parker, Worcester, Greene, Bigelow, 
William Ellery Channing, Edwin Booth, Phil- 
lips Brooks, and many like them whom the 
world will not soon forget. 

In this sweet summer day, their place of rest 
is so quiet and beautiful, — with the birds singing 
"5 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

here their lowest and tenderest songs, the soft 
winds breathing a lullaby in the leafy boughs, 
the air full of a grateful peace and calm, the 
trees spreading their great branches in perpetual 
benediction above the turf-grown graves, — it 
seems that here, if anywhere, the restless way- 
farer might learn to love restful death. 



Ii6 



OUT OF BOSTON 

II 

BELMONT: THE WAYSIDE 

INN: HOME OF WHITTIER 



Loiveirs Beaver Brook- Abode of Tronvbridge — Red Horse 
Tavern — Parsons and the Company of Longfelloiv' s 
Friends — Birthplace of JVhittier — Scenes of his Poems — 
Divelling and Grave of the Countess — Poiuoiv Hill — 
Whittier's Amesbury Home-Hi s Church and Tomb. 

A FEW miles westward from the classic shades 
^^ of Cambridge we found, perched upon a 
breezy height of Belmont, a picturesque, red- 
roofed villa, for some years the summer home of 
our ** Altrurian Traveller." From its verandas 
he overlooked a slumberous plain, diversified 
with meads, fields, country-seats, and heavy- 
tinted copses, and bordered by a circle of ver- 
dant hills ; while on the eastern horizon rises 
the distant city, crowned by the resplendent 
dome of the capitol. In his dainty white study 
here, with its gladsome fireplace and curious 
carvings and mottoes, Howells wrote — besides 
other good things — his " Lady of the Aroos- 
took," in which some claim to have discerned 
an answer to Henry James's " Daisy Miller." 
117 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

In this neighborhood is the valley of ** Beaver 
Brook," a favorite haunt of Lowell, to which 
he brought the English poet Arthur Clough. 
The old mill is removed, but we find the water- 
fall and the other romantic features little changed 
since the poet depicted the ideal beauties of 
this dale, in what has been adjudged one of the 
most artistic poems of modern times. 

In a charming retreat among the hills of 
Arlington, scarce a mile away from Howells*s 
sometime Belmont home, dwells and writes 
that genial and gifted poet and novelist, John 
T. Trowbridge, whose books — notably his 
war-time tales — have found readers round the 
world. 

Westward again from Belmont, a prolonged 
drive through a delightful country brings us to 
" Sudbury town" and the former hostelry of 
'Squire Howe, — the " Wayside Inn" of Long- 
fellow's " Tales." Our companion and guide 
is one who well knew the old house and its 
neighborhood in the halcyon days when Pro- 
fessor Treadwell, Parsons, — the poet of the 
"Bust of Dante," — and the quiet coterie of 
Longfellow's friends came, summer after sum- 
mer, to find rest and seclusion under its ample 
roof and sheltering trees, among the hills of 
this remote region. The environment of fra- 
ii8 



Longfellow's Wayside Inn 

grant meadow and smiling field, of deep wood 
glade and forest-clad height, is indeed alluring. 
About the ancient inn remain some of the giant 
elms and the " oak-trees, broad and high," 
shading it now as in the day when the " Tales'* 
immortalized it with the ** Tabard" of Chaucer; 
while through the near meadow circles the 
" well-remembered brook" of the poet's verse, 
in which his friends saw the inverted landscape 
and their own faces *' looking up at them from 
below." 

The house is a great, old-fashioned, bare 
and weather-worn edifice of wood, — " somewhat 
fallen to decay." — standing close upon the high- 
way. Its two stories of spacious rooms are 
supplemented by smaller chambers in a vast 
attic ; two or three chimneys, ** huge and tiled 
and tall," rise through its gambrel roofs among 
the bowering foliage ; a wing abuts upon one 
side and imparts a pleasing irregularity to the 
otherwise plain parallelogram. The wide, low- 
studded rooms are lighted by windows of many 
small panes. Among the apartments we find 
the one once occupied by Major Molineaux, 
" whom Hawthorne hath immortal made," and 
that of Dr. Parsons, the laureate of this place, 
who has celebrated it in the stanzas of ** Old 
House at Sudbury" and other poems. But it 
119 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

is the old inn parlor which most interests the 
literary visitor, — a great, low, square apartment, 
with oaken floors, ponderous beams overhead, 
and a broad hearth, where in the olden time 
blazed a log lire whose ruddy glow filled the 
room and shone out through the windows. It 
is this room which Longfellow peoples with his 
friends, who sat about the old fireplace and told 
his "Tales of a Wayside Inn." The "rapt 
musician" whose transfiguring portraiture we 
have in the Prelude is Ole Bull; the student 
" of old books and days" is Henry Wales ; the 
young Sicilian, " in sight of Etna born and 
bred," is Luigi Monti, who dined every Sunday 
with Longfellow ; the " Spanish Jew from Ali- 
cant" is Edrelei, a Boston Oriental dealer ; the 
" Theologian from the school of Cambridge on 
the Charles" is Professor Daniel Treadwell ; 
the Poet is T. W. Parsons, the Dantean student 
and translator of " Divina Commedia ;" the 
Landlord is 'Squire Lyman Howe, the portly 
bachelor who then kept this " Red Horse Tav- 
ern," as it was called. Most of this goodly 
circle have been here in the flesh, and our com- 
panion has seen them in this old room, as well 
as Longfellow himself, who came here years 
afterward, when the Landlord was dead and the 
poet's company had left the old inn forever. 



Longfellow's Wayside Inn 

In this room we see the corner where stood the 
ancient spinet, the spot on the wall where hung 
the highly colored coat of arms of Howe and 
the sword of his knightly grandfather near 
Queen Mary's pictured face, the places on the 
prismatic-hued windows where the names of 
Molineaux, Treadwell, etc., had been inscribed 
by hands that now are dust. 

Descendants of the woman who died of the 
" Shoe o' Num Palsy" are said to live in the 
neighborhood, as well as some other odd char- 
acters who are embalmed in Parsons's humorous 
verse. But the ancient edifice is no longer an 
inn ; the Red Horse on the swinging sign-board 
years ago ceased to invite the weary wayfarer to 
rest and cakes and ale; the memory-haunted 
chambers, where starry spirits met and tarried in 
the golden past, were later inhabited by laborers, 
who displayed the rooms for a fee and plied the 
pilgrim with lies anent the former famed occu- 
pants. The storied structure has recently passed 
to the possession of appreciative owners, — Hon. 
Herbert Howe being one of them, — who have 
made the repairs needful for its preservation and 
have placed it in the charge of a proper custo- 
dian. 

A longer way out of Boston, in another direc- 
tion, our guest is among the haunts of the be- 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

loved Quaker bard. On the bank of the Merri- 
mac — his own " lowland river'* — and among 
darkly wooded hills of hackmatack and pine, 
we find the humble farm-house, guarde<l by giant 
sentinel poplars, where eighty-eight years agone 
Whittier came into the world. 

Among the plain and bare apartments, with 
their low ceilings, antique cross-beams, and 
multipaned windows, we see the lowly chamber 
of his birth ; the simple study where his literary 
work was begun ; the great kitchen, with its 
brick oven and its heavy crane in the wide fire- 
place, where he laid the famous winter's evening 
scene in " Snow-Bound," peopling the plain 
** old rude-furnished room" with the persons he 
here best knew and loved. We see the dwell- 
ing little changed since the time when Whittier 
dwelt — a dark-haired lad — under its roof; it is 
now carefully preserved, and through the old 
rooms are disposed articles of furniture from his 
Amesbury cottage, which are objects of interest 
to many visitors. 

All about the place are spots of tender identi- 
fication of poet and poem : here are the brook 
and the garden wall of his " Barefoot Boy ;" the 
scene of his " Telling the Bees ;" the spring and 
meadow of " Maud Muller ;" not far away, 
with the sumachs and blackberries clustering about 

IZ2 



Scenes of Whittier's Poems 

it still, is the site of the rude academy of his 
*' School Days ;" and beyond the low hill the 
grasses grow upon the grave of the dear, brown- 
eyed girl who " hated to go above him." We 
may still loiter beneath the overarching syca- 
mores planted by poor Tallant, — " pioneer of 
Erin's outcasts," — where young Whittier pon- 
dered the story of ** Floyd Ireson with the hard 
heart." 

Delightful rambles through the country-side 
bring us to many scenes familiar to the tender 
poet and by him made familiar to all the world. 
Thus we come to the ** stranded village" of 
Aunt Mose, — " the muttering witch-wife of the 
gossip's tale," — where Whittier found the ma- 
terials out of which he wrought the touching 
poem " The Countess," and where we see the 
poor low rooms in which pretty, blue-eyed 
Mary Ingalls was born and lived a too brief 
life of love, and her sepulchre — now reclaimed 
from a tangle of brake and brier — in the lonely 
old burial-ground that " slopes against the 
west." Her grave is in the row nearest the 
dusty highway, and is marked by a mossy 
slab of slate, which is now protected from 
the avidity of relic-gatherers by a net-work of 
iron, bearing the inscription, ** The Grave of 
the Countess." 

123 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

Thus, too, we come to the ruined foundation 
of the cottage of " Mabel Martin, the Witch's 
Daughter," and look thence upon other haunts 
of the beloved bard, as well as upon his river 
** glassing the heavens" and the wave-like swells 
of foliage-clad hills which are ** The Laurels" 
of his verse. In West Newbury, the town of 
his " Northman's Written Rock," we find the 
comfortable ** Maplewood" homestead where 
lived and lately died the supposed sweetheart of 
the poet's early manhood. 

Whittier's beloved Amesbury, the " home of 
his heart," is larger and busier than he knew it, 
but, as we dally on its dusty avenues, we find 
them aglow with living memories of the sweet 
singer. In Friend Street stands — still occupied 
by Whittier's former friends — the plain little 
frame house which was so long his home. A 
bay window has been placed above the porch, 
but the place is otherwise little changed since 
he left it ; the same noble elms shade the front, 
the fruit-trees he planted and pruned and be- 
neath which the saddened throng sat at his 
funeral are in the garden ; here too are the 
grape-vines which were the especial objects of 
his loving care, — one of them grown from a 
rootlet sent to him in a letter by Charles 
Sumner. 

124 



Whittier's Amesbury Cottage 

Within, we see the famous *' garden room," 
which was his sanctum and workshop, and 
where this gentle man of peace waged valiant 
warfare with his pen for the rights of man. 
In this room, with its sunny outlook among 
his vines and pear-trees, he kept his chosen 
books, his treasured souvenirs ; and here he 
welcomed his friends, — Longfellow, Fields, 
Sumner, Lowell, Colonel Higginson, Bayard 
Taylor, Mrs. Thaxter, Mrs. Phelps-Ward, 
Alice Cary, Lucy Larcom, Sarah Orne Jew- 
ett, and many another illustrious child of 
genius. 

A quaint Franklin fireplace stood by one side 
wall, — usually surmounted in summer by a 
bouquet; in the nook between this and the 
sash-door was placed an old-fashioned writing- 
desk, and here he wrote many of the poems 
which brought him world-wide fame and voiced 
the convictions and the conscience of half the 
nation. Here are still preserved some of his 
cherished books. Above the study was Whit- 
tier's bedchamber, near the rooms of his mother, 
his ** youngest and dearest" sister, and the " dear 
aunt" (Mercy) of " Snow-Bound," who came 
with him to this home and shared it until their 
deaths. After the others were gone, the brother 
and sister long dwelt here alone, later a niece 
"5 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

was for some years his house-keeper, and at her 
marriage the poet gave up most of the house to 
some old friends, who kept his study and cham- 
ber in constant readiness for his return upon the 
prolonged sojourns which were continued until 
his last year of life, — this being always his best- 
loved home. 

Near by are the ** painted shingly town-house" 
of his verse, where during many years he failed 
not to meet with his neighbors to deposit ** the 
freeman*s vote for Freedom," and the little, 
wooden Friends* meeting-house, where he loved 
to sit in silent introspection among the people 
of his faith. The trees which now shade its 
plain old walls with abundant foliage were long 
ago planted by his hands. The " Powow Hill" 
of his " Preacher" and " The Prophecy of 
Samuel Sewall" rises steeply near his home, and 
was a favorite resort, to which he often came, 
alone or with his guests. One who has often 
stood with Whittier there pilots us to his ac- 
customed place on the lofty rounded summit, 
whence we overlook the village, the long reach 
of the " sea-seeking" river, and the entrancing 
scene pictured by the poet in the beautiful l-ines 
of " Miriam." 

From these precious haunts our pilgrim shoon 
trace the revered bard to the peaceful precincts 
126 



Whittier's Tomb 

of the God*s-acre — just without the town — 
where, in a sequestered spot beneath a dark cedar 
which sobs and soughs in the summer wind, his 
mortal part is forever laid, with his beloved 
sister and kindred, within 

*' the low green tent 
Whose curtain never outward swings.'* 



117 



OUT OF BOSTON 
III 
SALEM: WHITTIER'S OAK- 
KNOLL AND BEYOND 



Cemetery of Haivthorne* s Ancestors- Birthplace of Haivthorne 
and his Wife- Where Fame to as luon-House of the Seven 
Gables-Custom- House- Where Scarlet Letter was written 
-Main Street and Witch Hill - Sights from a Steeple- 
Later Homeof Whittier-Norman's Woe— Lucy Larcom- 
Parton^ etc. -Ri vermouth- Thaxter, 

\ HALF-HOUR'S jaunt by train brings us 
to the shaded streets of quaint old Salem 
and the scenes of Hawthorne's early life, work, 
and triumph. Here we find on Charter Street, 
in the old cemetery of ** Dr. Grimshaw*s Secret** 
and " Dolliver Romance,** the sunken and turf- 
grown graves of Hawthorne*s mariner ancestors, 
some of whom sailed forth on the ocean of 
eternity nearly two centuries ago. Among the 
curiously carved gravestones of slate we see that 
of John Hathorn, the ** witch-judge" of Haw- 
thorne*s ** Note-Books.** Close at hand repose 
the ancestors of the novelist*s wife, and the 
Doctor Swinnerton who preceded " Dolliver'* 
and who was called to consider the cause of 

128 



Hawthorne's Salem 

Colonel Pyncheon*s death in the opening chap- 
ter of " The House of the Seven Gables." 

The sombre house which encroaches upon a 
corner of the cemetery enclosure — with the 
green billows surging about it so closely that its 
side windows are within our reach from the 
gravestones — was the home of the Peabodys, 
whence Hawthorne wooed the amiable Sophia, 
and where, in his tales, he domiciled Grandsir 
** Dolliver'* and also ** Doctor Grimshaw" with 
Ned and Elsie. We found it a rather depressing, 
hip-roofed, low-studded, and irregular edifice of 
wood, standing close upon the street, and ob- 
viously degenerated a little from the degree of 
respectability — "not sinking below the boundary 
of the genteel" — which the romancer ascribed 
to it. The little porch or hood protects the 
front entrance, and the back door communicates 
with the cemetery, — a circumstance which re- 
calls the novelist's fancy that the dead might get 
out of their graves at night and steal into this 
house to warm themselves at the convenient 
fireside. 

Not many rods distant, in Union Street, stands 
the little house where Captain Hathorn left his 
family when he went away to sea, and where the 
novelist was born. The street is small, shabby, 
shadeless, dispiriting, — its inhabitants not select, 
I 129 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

The house — builded by Hawthorne^s grand- 
father and lately numbered twenty-seven — 
stands close to the sidewalk, upon which its 
door-stone encroaches, leaving no space for flower 
or vine ; the garden where Hawthorne ** rolled 
on a grass-plot under an apple-tree and picked 
abundant currants" is despoiled of turf and tree, 
and the wooden house walls rise bare and bleak. 
It is a plain, uninviting, eight-roomed structure, 
with a lower addition at the back, and with a 
square central chimney-stack rising like a tower 
above the gambrel roof. The rooms are low 
and contracted, with quaint corner fireplaces 
and curiously designed closets, and with pro- 
tuberant beams crossing the ceilings. From the 
entrance between the front rooms a narrow 
winding stair leads to an upper landing, at the 
left of which we find the little, low-ceiled cham- 
ber where, ninety years ago, America's greatest 
romancer first saw the light. It is one of the 
most cheerless of rooms, with rude fireplace of 
bricks, a mantel of painted planks, and two 
small windows which look into the verdureless 
yard. In a modest brick house upon the oppo- 
site side of the street, and but a few rods distant 
from the birthplace of her future husband, Haw- 
thorne's wife was born five years subsequent to 
his nativity. 

130 



The Manning House 

Abutting upon the back yard of Hawthorne's 
birthplace is the old Manning homestead of his 
maternal ancestors, the home of his own youth 
and middle age and the theatre of his struggles 
and triumph. It is known as number twelve 
Herbert Street, and is a tall, unsightly, erratic 
fabric of wood, with nothing pleasing or gracious 
in its aspect or environment. The ugly and 
commonplace character of his surroundings here 
during half his life must have been peculiarly 
depressing to such a sensitive temperament as 
Hawthorne's, and doubtless accounts for his men- 
tal habits. That he had no joyous memories of 
this old house his letters and journals abundantly 
show. Its interior arrangement has been some- 
what changed to accommodate the several fam- 
ilies of laborers who have since inhabited it, 
and one front room seems to have been used as 
a shop ; but it is not difficult to identify the 
haunted chamber which was Hawthorne's bed- 
room and study. This little, dark, dreary 
apartment under the eaves, with its multipaned 
window looking down into the room where he 
was born, is to us one of the most interesting of 
all the Hawthorne shrines. Here the magician 
kept his solitary vigil during the long period of 
his literary probation, shunning his family, de- 
clining all human sympathy and fellowship, for 
131 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

some time going abroad only after nightfall ; 
here he studied, pondered, wrote, revised, de- 
stroyed, day after day as the slow months went 
by ; and here, after ten years of working and 
waiting for the world to know him, he tri- 
umphantly recorded, " In this dismal chamber 
FAME was won.** Here he wrote " Twice- 
Told Tales" and many others, which were pub- 
lished in various periodicals, and here, after his 
residence at the old Manse, — for it was to this 
Manning house that he ** always came back, like 
the bad halfpenny," as he said, — he completed 
the " Mosses." This old dwelling is one of 
the several which have been fixed upon as 
being the original " House of the Seven Gables," 
despite the novelist's averment that the Pyncheon 
mansion was " of materials long in use for con- 
structing castles in the air." The pilgrim in 
Salem will be persistently assured that a house 
which stands near the shore by the foot of 
Turner Street, and is known as number thirty- 
four, was the model of Hawthorne's structure. 
It is an antique edifice of some architectural 
pretensions, displays five fine gables, and has 
spacious wainscoted and frescoed apartments, 
with quaint mantels and other evidences of co- 
lonial stateliness. It was an object familiar to the 
novelist from his boyhood, — he had often visited 
13a 



Hawthorne's Custom-House 

it while it was the home of pretty ** Susie" 
Ingersol, — and it may have suggested the style 
of architecture he employed for the visionary 
mansion of the tale. The names Maule and 
Pyncheon, employed in the story, were those 
of old residents of Salem. 

But a few rods from Herbert Street is the 
Custom-House where Hawthorne did irksome 
duty as " Locofoco Surveyor," its exterior being 
— except for the addition of a cupola — essen- 
tially unchanged since his description was writ- 
ten, and its interior being even more somnolent 
than of yore. The wide and worn granite steps 
still lead up to the entrance portico ; above it 
hovers the same enormous specimen of the 
American eagle, and a recent reburnishing has 
rendered even more evident the truculent atti- 
tude of that " unhappy fowl." The entry- way 
where the venerable officials of Hawthorne*s 
time sat at the receipt of customs has been 
renovated, the antique chairs in which they 
used to drowse, " tilted back against the wall,'* 
have given place to others of more modern and 
elegant fashion, and the patriarchal dozers them- 
selves — lying now in the profounder slumber 
of death — are replaced by younger and sprightlier 
successors, who wear their dignities and pocket 
their emoluments. At the left we find the 
133 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

room, " fifteen feet square and of lofty height," 
which was Hawthorne's office during the period 
of his surveyorship : it is no longer " cob- 
webbed and dingy," but is tastefully refitted and 
refurnished, and the once sanded floor, which 
the romancer "paced from corner to corner" 
like a caged lion, is now neatly carpeted. The 
" exceedingly decrepit and infirm" chairs, and 
the three-legged stool on which he lounged with 
his elbow on the old pine desk, have been re- 
tired, and the desk itself is now tenderly cher- 
ished among the treasures of the Essex Institute, 
on Essex Street, a few blocks distant, where the 
custodian proudly shows us the name of Haw- 
thorne graven within the lid, in some idle 
moment, by the thumb-nail of the novelist. 
Some yellow documents bearing his official 
stamp and signature are preserved at the Custom- 
House, and the courteous official who now occu- 
pies Hawthorne's room displays to us here a 
rough stencil plate marked "Salem N Haw- 
thorne Surr 1847," by means of which knowl- 
edge of Hawthorne's existence was blazoned 
abroad " on pepper-bags, cigar-boxes, and bales 
of dutiable merchandise," instead of on title- 
pages. The arched window, by which stood 
his desk, commands a view upon which his 
vision often rested, and which seems to us de- 
>34 



Hawthorne's Custom-House 

cidedly more pleasing and attractive than he has 
led us to expect. The picturesque old wharf 
in the foreground, the white-sailed shipping, 
and a shimmering expanse of water extending 
to the farther bold headlands of the coast form, 
we think, a pleasant picture for the lounger 
here. 

The apartment opposite to Hawthorne's was, 
in his day, occupied by the brave warrior Gen- 
eral James Miller, who is graphically described 
as the " old Collector" in the introduction to 
** Scarlet Letter ;" in the room directly above it 
— which is the private office of the present 
chief executive, the genial Collector Waters — 
a portrait of the hero of Lundy's Lane now 
looks down from the wall upon the visitor ; but 
no picture of Hawthorne is to be found in the 
edifice. 

An ample room at the right of the hall on 
the second floor, now handsomely fitted and 
furnished, was in Hawthorne's time open and 
unfinished, its bare beams festooned with cob- 
webs and its floor lumbered with barrels and 
bundles of musty official documents ; and it 
was here that he discovered, among the accumu- 
lated rubbish of the past, the " scarlet, gold- 
embroidered letter," and the manuscript of Sur- 
veyor Prue, — Hawthorne's ancient predecessor 
«3S 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

in office, — which recorded the ** doings and 
sufferings" of Hester Prynne. 

A short walk from the Custom-House brings 
us to the spot where, with ** public notices 
posted upon its front and an iron goblet chained 
to its waist," stood that "eloquent monolo- 
gist," the town-pump of Havvthorne*s famous 
" Rill." Already its locality, at the corner of 
Essex and Washington Streets, is pointed out 
with pride as being among the sites memora- 
ble in the town's history, and thus the playful 
prophecy with which Hawthorne terminates 
the sketch of his official life is more than ful- 
filled. 

The spacious and well-preserved old frame 
house at number fourteen Mall Street — a neigh- 
borhood superior to that of his former residences 
— was Hawthorne's abode for three or four 
years. It was here that he, on the day of his 
official death, announced to his wife, " Well, 
Sophie, my head is off, so I must write a book ;" 
and here, in the ensuing six months, disturbed 
and distressed by illness of his family, by the 
death of his mother, and by financial needs, he 
wrote our most famous romance, ** The Scarlet 
Letter." A bare little room in the front of the 
third story was his study here, and while he 
wrote in solitude his wife worked in a sitting- 
136 



Salem— Witch Hill 

room just beneath, decorating lamp-shades whose 
sale helped to sustain the household. 

As we saunter along the " Main Street" of 
Hawthorne's sketch and the other shady avenues 
he knew so well, the curious old town, which 
in his discontent he called tame and unattractive, 
seems to our eyes picturesque and beautiful, with 
its wide elm-bordered streets, its grassy way- 
sides, its many gardens and square^ embowered 
dwellings, not greatly changed since he knew 
them. If we follow " the long and lazy street" 
to the Witch Hill, which the novelist describes 
in "Alice Doane's Appeal," we may behold 
from that unhappy spot, where men and women 
suffered death for imagined misdoing, the whole 
of Hawthorne's Salem, with the environment 
he pictures in " Sights from a Steeple." We 
see the house-roofs of the town — half hidden 
by clustering foliage — extending now from the 
slopes of the fateful hill to the glinting waters 
of the harbor ; the farther expanse of field and 
meadow, dotted with white villages and scored 
with shadowy water-ways ; the craggy coast, 
with the Atlantic thundering endlessly against 
its headlands. Yonder is the steeple of Haw- 
thorne's vision, beyond is the scene of the ex- 
quisite ** Footprints in the Sand," and across 
the blue of the rippling sea we behold the place 
137 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

of the fierce fight in which the gallant Lawrence 
lost at once his ship and his life. 

Not far from Salem is Oak-Knoll, where the 
white-souled Whittier, " wearing his silver 
crown," passed " life's late afternoon" with his 
devoted relatives. It is a delightful, sheltered 
old country-seat, with wide lawns, and scores 
of broad acres wooded with noble trees, beneath 
which the poet loved to stroll or sit, soothed 
and inspirited by the gracious and generous 
beauty of the scene about him. 

One spot in the glimmering shade of an over- 
arching oak is shown as his favorite resort. 
Close by the house is a circular, green-walled 
garden, where, in summer mornings, he delighted 
to work with rake and hoe among the flowers. 
The mansion is a dreamful, old-fashioned edifice, 
with wide and lofty piazzas, whose roofs are 
upheld by massive columns ; and, with its grand 
setting of trees, it presents a pleasing picture. 
Whittier's study — a pleasant, cheerful room, 
with a delightful outlook and sunny exposure, a 
friendly-looking fireplace, and a glass door open- 
ing upon the veranda — was especially erected 
for him in a corner of the house, and here his 
later poems were penned. A bright and ample 
chamber above the parlor was his sleeping-apart- 
ment. 

138 



Whittier — Longfellow, etc. 

The sweet poetess Miss Preston and the 
sprightly and versatile " Gail Hamilton" dwelt 
in the neighborhood and came often to this 
room to talk with the ** transplanted prophet of 
Amesbury." Lucy Larcom and that " Sappho 
of the isles," Celia Thaxter, came less fre- 
quently. The place is still occupied by the 
relatives Whittier loved, who have preserved 
essentially unchanged the scenes he here in- 
habited. 

A little farther up the rock-bound coast are the 
scene of Lucy Larcom's touching poem " Han- 
nah*s at the Window Binding Shoes ;" the 
hearth-stone where Longfellow saw his " Fire of 
Drift-Wood ;" and the bleak sea-side home of 
" Floyd Ireson" of Whittier*s verse. Beyond 
these lie the sometime summer homes of the 
poet Dana, Harriet Prescott SpofFord, Fields, 
and Whipple, with that Mecca of the tourist, 
the savage reef of Norman*s Woe, — celebrated 
in Longfellow's pathetic poem as the scene of 
" The Wreck of the Hesperus," — not far away ; 
while across the harbor a summer resort of the 
gifted Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward stands — 
an " Old Maid's Paradise" no longer — among 
the rocks of the shore. 

By the mouth of Whittier's " lowland river" 
we find the birthplace of Lloyd Garrison, the 
139 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

ancestral abode of the Longfellows, the tomb of 
Whitefield beneath the spot where he preached, 
the once sojourn of Talleyrand. Here, too, 
still inhabited by his family, we find the large, 
three-storied corner house in which Parton spent 
his last twenty years of busy life, and the low 
book-lined attic study where, in his cherished 
easy-chair with his manuscript resting upon a 
lap-board, he did much of his valuable work. 

Still farther northward, we come to the an- 
cient town of Aldrich's " Bad Boy"-hood, — im- 
mortalized as the " Rivermouth" of his prose, — 
the place of Longfellow's " Lady Wentworth," 
the home of Hawthorne's Sir William Pep- 
perell ; and to the picturesque island realm of 
that " Princess of Thule," Celia Thaxter, and 
her gifted poet-brother Laighton ; — but these 
shrines are worthy of a separate pilgrimage. 



140 



OUT OF BOSTON 

IV 

WEBSTER'S MARSHFIELD: 

BROOK FARM, ETC 



Scenes of the Old Oaken Bucket-JVebster'' s Home and Grave— 
Where Emerson won his Wife — Home of Miss Peabody 
— Parkman — Miss Guiney - AldricV s Ponkapog — Farm 
of Ripley^ s Community — Relics and Reminiscences. 

/^NE day's excursion out of Boston is south- 
^■'^ ward through the birthplace and ancestral 
home of the brilliant essayist Quincy to the 
boyhood haunts of Woodworth and the scenes 
which inspired his sweetest lyric. In Scituate, 
by the village of Greenbush, we find the well 
of the " Old Oaken Bucket" remaining at the 
site of the dwelling where the poet was born 
and reared. Most of the " loved scenes" of his 
childhood — the wide-spreading pond, the ven- 
erable orchard, the flower-decked meadow, the 
"deep-tangled wildwood" — may still be seen, 
little changed since he knew them ; but the rock 
of the cataract has been removed and the cas- 
cade itself somewhat altered by the widening of 
the highway ; the " cot of his father" has given 
place to a modern farm-house ; and the ** moss- 
141 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

covered bucket that hung in the well" has been 
supplanted by a convenient but unpoetical pump. 

A few miles beyond this romantic spot we 
come to the Marshfield home of Daniel Webster, 
set in the midst of a pleasant rural region, 
not far from the ancient abode of Governor 
Winslow of the Plymouth colony. On the 
site of Webster's farm-house of thirty rooms — 
destroyed by fire some years ago — his son's 
widow erected a pretty and tasteful modern 
cottage, in which she preserved many relics of 
the illustrious statesman and orator, which had 
been rescued from the flames. Some of the 
relics were afterward removed to Boston, and, 
the family becoming extinct with the death of 
Mrs. Fletcher Webster, the place found an 
appreciatory proprietor in Mr. Walton Hall, a 
Boston business-man who was reared in this 
neighborhood, where Webster's was ** a name 
to conjure by." 

The objects connected with the memory of 
the statesman have been as far as possible pre- 
served, and we find the cottage partially furnished 
with his former belongings. Here we see his 
writing-table, covered with ink-stained green 
baize ; his phenomenally large arm-chair with 
seat of leather ; the andirons from his study 
fireplace ; the heavy cane he used in his walks 
142 



Webster's Home and Grave 

about the farm ; portraits of the great genius loci 
— one of them representing him in his coarse 
farm attire — and of members of his family ; a 
fine cabinet of beetles and butterflies presented 
to him by the Emperor of Brazil ; and a number 
of paintings, articles of furniture, and bric-'a-brac 
which had once been Webster's. 

Near the house stand the great memorial elms, 
each planted by Webster's hand at the death of 
one of his children. His favorite tree, beneath 
which his coffined figure lay at his funeral, was 
injured by the fire and has since been removed. 
Behind the house is a pretty lakelet, on whose 
surface — by his desire — lights were kept burn- 
ing at [night during his last illness, so that he 
might see them from his bed in the Pink Room 
where he died. 

His study window looked out through a colon- 
nade of trees upon the hill-side cemetery — a 
furlong distant — where he now sleeps in a spot 
he loved and chose for his sepulchre. His 
tomb, on the brow of the hill, is marked by a 
huge mound of earth crowned by a ponderous 
marble slab. The memorial stones about it 
were erected by him to commemorate his 
family, already sleeping in the vault here before 
he came to lie among them ; — all save one, and 
that one died at Bull Run. 
143 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

Not far away lie Governor Winslow and the 
Peregrine White who was born on the May- 
flower. From among the neglected graves we 
look abroad upon the acres Webster tilled, the 
creeks he fished, the meadows he hunted, the 
haunts of his leisure during many years : on the 
one hand, we see a stretch of verdant pastures 
and lowly hills dotted by white cottages and 
bounded by distant forests ; on the other hand, 
across the wave-like dunes and glistening sands 
we see a silver rim flecked with white sails, — 
the ocean, whose low-sounding monotone, eter- 
nally responding to some whisper of the infinite, 
mayhap lulls the dreamless sleepers beneath our 
feet. 

Southward again, we come to historic old 
Plymouth, with its many Puritan shrines and 
associations, which did not prevent its becoming 
a shire-town of Transcendentalism. Here we 
see the house (framed in England, and erected 
here upside down) where Emerson, the foun- 
tain-head of that great "wave of spirituality," 
wooed and won Miss Jackson to be his wife ; 
and not far away the lovely spot where, among 
his gardens, groves, and orchards, Marston 
Watson had his ** Hillside'* home, — to which 
resorted Emerson, Theodore Parker, Peabody, 
Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott, and which the 
144 



Miss Peabody — Parkman 

latter celebrated in a sonnet. Here, too, we 
find the church where Kendall preached, and 
the farm of Morton, the earliest historian of 
the Western world. 

In the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain we 
find, near the station, the modest apartments 
where Miss Elizabeth Peabody — the " Saint 
Elizabeth'* of her friends — passed her later years, 
and where, not many months ago, she died, 
having survived nearly all her associates in the 
earlier struggle for the enlargement of the bounds 
of spiritual freedom. She had been the intimate 
friend of Emerson, Channing, Theodore Parker, 
and the rest ; and of the wider spirituality 
which they proclaimed she was esteemed a 
prophetess. Most of her literary work was 
done before she came to this home ; and the 
latest literary eiFort of her life, her autobiog- 
raphy (which was undertaken here in age and 
weariness), was frustrated by her increasing in- 
firmities. 

In the same delightful suburb was the ideally 
beautiful home of the historian Francis Park- 
man. His wide and tasteful dwelling sur- 
mounted an elevation overlooking a pretty lake- 
let, and was environed by ample grounds filled 
with choicest shrubbery and flowers, where 
there were roods of the roses and lilies he loved 

K 145 



In and Out of Literary Boston. 

and studied. In this place he lived thirty-four 
years, and, although practically blind and rarely 
free from torturing pain, he here produced many 
volumes and accomplished the work which places 
him among the foremost historians of the age. 
In this home he died a year or so ago : his 
grounds having been taken for a public park, 
it is now proposed to erect here a bronze memo- 
rial of the great historian amid the floral beauty 
he created and cherished. 

In the remoter region of Canton, Thomas 
Bailey Aldrich has a sometime summer home, 
erected among enchanting landscapes, where he 
has pondered and written much of his dainty 
prose and daintier poesy. The curious name 
of this rural retreat is preserved in the title 
of his entertaining volume of travel-sketches, 
** From Ponkapog to Pesth." The tree near 
his door was the home of the pair of birds he 
described in the delightful sketch " Our New 
Neighbors at Ponkapog." 

A morning's drive westward through the shade 
and sheen of a delectable urban district conveys 
us to the village of Auburndale, where we find 
the tasteful cottage home of Louise Imogen 
Guiney, with its French roofs, wide windows, 
square tower, and embosoming foliage. Here, if 
we come properly accredited, we may (or might 
146 



Miss Guiney — Brook Farm 

before she became the village postmistress) see 
the gifted poetess of "White Sail" and "Road- 
side Harp" and essayist of ** English Gallery" 
and " Prose Idyls" — a petite and attractive 
young lady — at her desk, surrounded by her 
treasures of books and bric-k-brac and with the 
portraits of many friends looking down upon 
her from the walls of the square upper room 
where she writes. She has little to say con- 
cerning her own work, — fascinating as it is to 
her, — but discourses pleasantly on many topics 
and narrates con amore the history of the pre- 
cious tomes and the literary relics she has gath- 
ered here, and describes the traits and lineage 
of her beloved canine pets, who have been exe- 
crated by some of her neighbors. 

Nearer Jamaica Plain is the quiet corner of 
West Roxbury, where the exalted community 
of Brook Farmers attempted to realize in external 
and material fashion their high ideals and to 
inaugurate the precursor of an Arcadian era. In 
this season, " the sweet o* the year," we find 
the farm a delightful spot, fully warranting Haw- 
thorne's eulogium in " Blithedale Romance." 
The songful stream which gives the place its 
name is margined by verdant and sun-kissed 
meads which slope away to the circling Charles ; 
on either side, fields and picturesque pastures — 
147 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

broken here and there by rocky ledges and copse- 
covered knolls — swell upward to feathery ac- 
clivities of pine and oak, with rugged escarp- 
ments of rock. From the elevation about the 
farm-house we overlook most of the domain of 
these social reformers, — the many acres of 
woodlands, the orchards and fields where Ripley, 
George William Curtis, Hawthorne, Dwight, 
Bedford, Pratt, Dana, and other transcendental 
enthusiasts held sublimated discourse while they 
performed the coarsest farm drudgery, applied 
uncelestial fertilizers, ** belabored rugged fur- 
rows," or delved for the infinite in a peat-bog. 
Curtis has said ** there never were such witty 
potato-patches, such sparkling corn-fields ; the 
weeds were scratched out of the ground to the 
music of Tennyson and Browning." The farm- 
house stands above the highway, and is shaded 
by giant trees planted by Ripley and his asso- 
ciates. It is a commodious, antiquated structure 
of weather-worn wood, two stories in height, 
with a vast attic beneath the sloping roofs and 
an extension which has been recently enlarged. 
The original edifice is a ponderous fabric of 
almost square form, with an entrance in the mid- 
dle of the front, massive chimneys at either end, 
and contains four spacious lower rooms, besides 
an outer scullery. Here we see the sitting-room 
148 



Brook Farm 

of the reformers, where at first Channing some- 
times preached and the now " Nestor of Ameri- 
can journalism" sang bass in the choir; their 
refectory, where Dana served as head-waiter; 
and their brick-paved kitchen, where the erudite 
Mrs. Ripley and the soulful Margaret Fuller 
sometimes helped to prepare the bran bread and 
baked beans for the exalted brotherhood. Ad- 
joining is the old " wash-room," where some 
who have since become famous in literature or 
politics pounded the soiled linen in a hogshead 
with a heavy wooden pestle ; and just without 
is the turf-carpeted yard where the dignified 
and handsome Hawthorne, the brilliant Charles 
A. Dana (who certainly was the most popular 
member of the community), and the genial Cur- 
tis were sometimes seen hanging the moist gar- 
ments upon the lines, a truly edifying spectacle 
for gods and men. It was from Curtis's pockets 
that the clothes-pins sometimes dropped during 
the evening dances. Some of the trees yet to 
be seen near the house were rooted from the 
nursery established here by Dana. 

This old house was the original " Hive" of 
the community, who added the extensive wing 
at the back, but increasing numbers soon forced 
a portion of the company to swarm, and other 
dormitories were erected. Of these we find ves- 
149 



In and Out of Literary Boston 

tiges of the ** Eyrie" — which was also used as a 
school-house — upon a commanding ledge at a 
little distance from the house, and nearer the 
grove where the rural festivals of the association 
were held. Of the " Nest," the little house 
where Miss Ripley lived, the ** Cottage," where 
Margaret Fuller lodged during her sojourns at the 
farm, the large barn, where social seances wctq held 
while the starry company prepared vegetables 
for the market, and the other steading erected 
by the community, only the cellars and broken 
foundations remain. In the wood at some dis- 
tance from the house is the " Eliot's Pulpit" of 
Coverdale's narrative, a mass of rock crowning 
a knoll and having a great fissure through its 
core ; in the forest beyond we may find " Cover- 
dale's Walk," and the " Hermitage" where he 
heard by accident the colloquy of Westervelt 
and Zenobia. 

After the day of Ripley's brilliant colony the 
broad acres of Brook Farm were tilled by the 
town poor, and — " to what base uses !" — the 
pretty cottage of Margaret Fuller became a 
loathsome small-pox pest-house; the rooms of 
the " Hive," after six years of familiarity with 
ideal refiners and reformers, became the abode 
of paupers, and at this day are aswarm with an 
odorous multitude of German orphans, wards 
150 



Brook Farm 

of a Lutheran society that now owns the 
place. 

While the pilgrim may find but few traces of 
the physical labors of the choice spirits who 
once inhabited this spot, the beneficent results 
of the mental and moral work here accom- 
plished — especially among the young — are 
manifest and ineffaceable. These infertile fields 
yielded but scant returns for the manual toil of 
the optimistic philosophers, but their earnest 
strivings toward social and mental emancipation 
have borne abundant fruit. 



i5> 



In BERKSHIRE WITH 
HAWTHORNE 



I. The Gray lock and Hoosac 

Region 

II. Lenox and Middle Berkshire 



THE GRAYLOCK AND HOOSAC 
REGION 

North Adams and about — Hanvthorne' i Acquaintances and 
Excursions - Actors and Incidents of Ethan Brand — 
Kiln of Bertram the Lime- Burner - Natural Bridge — 
Gray lock — Thoreau — Hoosac Mountain — Deerfeld Arch 
— Williamstoiun — Bryant. 

'T'HE Hawthorne pilgrimage has drawn us to 
"■• many shrines : the sunny scenes of " The 
Marble Faun," the peaceful landscapes of " Our 
Old Home,** the now busy city of " The Scarlet 
Letter,** the elm-shaded Salem of " Dr. Grim- 
shaw** and " The House of the Seven Gables,'* 
the Manse of the " Mosses,'* the Wayside of 
"Septimius Felton** and "The Dolliver Ro- 
mance," — these and many another resort of the 
subtile romancer, in the Old World and the 
New, have held our lingering feet. 

Amid the splendors of a New England Sep- 
tember we follow him into the " headlong 
Berkshire" of " Ethan Brand" and " Tangle- 
wood Tales." 

Hawthorne was more than most writers in- 
fluenced by environment ; the situations and 
circumstances under which his work was pro- 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

duced often determined its tone and color, while 
the persons, localities, and occurrences observed 
by his alert senses in the real world about him 
were skilfully wrought into his romance. His 
residence in Berkshire affected not only the 
books written there, b-ut some subsequently pro- 
duced, and the scenery of this loveliest corner of 
New England supplied the setting for many of his 
tales. Some of the best passages of his " Ameri- 
can Note-Books" are records of his observations 
in this region, — sundry scenes, characters, and 
incidents being afterward literally transcribed 
therefrom into his fiction, — while a few of his 
shorter stories seem to have been suggested by 
legends once current in Berkshire. It passes, 
therefore, that for us the greatest charm of this 
realm of delights is that all its beauties — the 
grandeur of its mountains, the enchantment of 
its valleys, the glamour of its autumn woods, 
the sheen of its lakelets, the sapphire of its 
skies — serve to bring us into closer sympathy 
with Hawthorne, to whom these beauties were 
once a familiar vision. 

He first came to Berkshire in the summer of 
1838. For thirteen years he had bravely " waited 
for the world to know" him. His " Twice- 
Told Tales" had brought him little fame or 
money, but they had procured him the friend- 
156 



The Graylock and Hoosac Region 

ship of the Peabodys, and it would appear that 
he and the lovely Sophia already loved each 
other. In a letter to her sister Elizabeth, writ- 
ten early in the summer, Sophia says, " Haw- 
thorne came one morning for a take-leave call, 
looking radiant. He said he was not going to 
tell any one, not even his mother, where he 
should be for the next months ; he thought he 
should change his name, so that if he died no one 
would be able to find his gravestone. We asked 
him to keep a journal while he was gone. He 
at first said he would not write anything, but 
finally concluded it would suit very well for 
hints for future stories." It was from his jour^ 
nal of these months of mysterious retirement 
that, forty years later, the gentle Sophia — then 
his widow — transcribed those pages of the 
** Note-Books" which contain the account of his 
sojourn in upper Berkshire and of his observa- 
tions and meditations there. How far the journal 
furnished ** hints for future stories" the literary 
world well knows. 

A few days after this <* take-leave call" we 
find Hawthorne at Pittsfield, where his Berk- 
shire saunterings (and ours) fitly began. We 
follow him northward along a curving valley 
hemmed by mountains that slope upward to the 
azure ; on the right rise the rugged Hoosacs in 
'57 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

** Wave-like walls that block the sky 
With tints of gold and mists of bluej" 

on the left loom the darkly-wooded domes of 
the Taconics above the bright upland pastures, 
while before us grand old ** Graylock" uprears 
his head "shaggy with primeval forest," — his 
gigantic shape forming the culmination of the su- 
perb landscape. Hawthorne's superlative pleas- 
ure of beholding this grandeur and beauty from 
the driver's seat of a stage and being regaled at 
the same time by the converse of the driver is 
denied to us, but we enjoy quite as much as did 
Hawthorne the little ** love-pats" and passages 
of a newly-wedded pair of our fellow-passengers. 
The stage has disappeared, the driver and the 
high-stepping steeds which served him "in 
wheel and in whoa" have given place to the 
engineer and the locomotive ; the changes of 
the half-century since Hawthorne journeyed 
here have well-nigh overturned the world ; only 
the eternal beauty of these hills and the bewray- 
ing demeanor of the newly-married remain ever- 
more unchanged. 

At North Adams, which the magician, " liking 

indifferent well, made his head-quarters," we have 

lodgings near the place of his on the Main Street 

and in the domicile of one who, as a lad of fourteen 

158 



Hawthorne at North Adams 

years, had known Hawthorne during his stay- 
here. Apparently he did not attempt to carry 
out his plan of concealing his identity ; he 
certainly was known to some of the villagers as 
the author of " Twice-Told Tales," and a de- 
scendant of one of Hawthorne's " seven doctors 
of the place" recalls his delight on being told 
that the " Whig Tavern boarder" was the creator 
of " The Gentle Boy ;" and he remembers his 
subsequent and consequent worshipful espionage 
of the wonderful being. To this espionage we 
are indebted for some edifying details of Haw- 
thorne's sojourn in upper Berkshire. The world 
has known few handsomer men than Hawthorne 
was at this period of his life, — he had been 
styled Oberon at college, — and our informant 
recollects him as " the most brilliantly handsome 
person he ever beheld," tall, dark, with an ex- 
pressive mobile face and a lustrous eye which 
held something " indescribably more than keen- 
ness" in its quick glances. (Charles Reade said 
Hawthorne's eye was " like a violet with a soul 
in it.") As remembered here, his expression 
was often abstracted, sometimes despondent. 
He would sit for hours at a time on the broad 
porch of the old " North Adams House," or in 
a corner of the bar-room, silently smoking and 
apparently oblivious to his surroundings, yet, 
159 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

as we know, vigilant to note the oddities of 
character and opinion he encountered. It is 
certain that he did not drink immoderately at 
this time. There were a few persons — not the 
model men of the community — to whom he 
occasionally unbent and whom he admitted to a 
sort of comradeship, which, as his diary shows, 
often became confessionary upon their part. 
With these he held prolonged converse upon 
the tavern porch, — his part in the conversations 
being mainly suggestions calculated to elicit the 
whimsical conceits or experiences of his com- 
panions, — sitting the while in the posture of the 
venerable custom-house officials, described in 
the sketch introductory to the ** Scarlet Letter," 
with " chair tipped on its hind legs" and his 
feet elevated against a pillar of the porch. 
Among those remembered to have been thus 

favored was Captain C , called Captain 

Gavett in the " Note-Books," who dispensed 
metaphysics and maple sugar from the tavern 
steps, and a jolly blacksmith named Wetherel, 
described by Hawthorne as " big in the paunch 
and enormous in the rear," who came regularly 
to the bar for his stimulant. Another was the 
" lath-like, round-backed, rough-bearded, thin- 
visaged" stage-driver, Piatt, whom Hawthorne 
honors as " a friend of mine" in the diary, and 
1 60 



Characters of his Fiction 

whose acquaintance he made during the ride 
from Pittsfield. In later years Piatt's pride in 
having known Hawthorne eclipsed even his sense 
of distinction in being ** the first and only man 
to drive an ox-team to the top of Graylock, 
sir." He had once been employed to haul the 
materials for an observatory up that mountain's 
steep inclines. Of the other ** hangers-on" who 
were wont to infest the bar-room and porch 
fifty years ago and whom Hawthorne depicts in 
his journal and his fiction, few of the present 
generation of loungers in the place have ever 

heard. Orrin , the sportive widower 

whose peccadilloes are hinted at in the ** Note- 
Books," is remembered by older residents of the 
town, and the " fellow who refused to pay six 
dollars for the cofiin in which his wife was 
buried" may still be named as the personifica- 
tion of meanness. The maimed and dissolute 
Daniel Haines — nicknamed ** Black Hawk" — 
was then a familiar figure in the village streets, 
and his unique history and appearance could not 
escape the notice of the great romancer nor be 
soon forgotten by the towns-people. As Haw- 
thorne says, " he had slid down by degrees from 
law to the soap-vat." Once a reputable lawyer, 
his bibulous habits and an accident — his hand 
being ** torn away by the devilish grip of a 
L i6i 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

steam-engine" — had so reduced him that at the 
time Hawthorne saw him he maintained him- 
self by boiling soap and practising phrenology. 
It is remembered that he used to " feel of 
bumps" for the price of a drink, and that, Haw- 
thorne's head being submitted to his manipula- 
tion, he gravely assured the tavern company, 
** This man was created to shine as a bank presi- 
dent," and then privately advised the landlord to 
** make that chap pay in advance for his board." 
A resident tells us that this dirty and often 
drunken Haines used to make biweekly visits 
to his father's house, with a cart drawn by dis- 
reputable-looking dogs, to receive fat in ex- 
change for soap. The novelist touches this odd 
character many times in his journal, and utilizes 
it in the romance of " Ethan Brand," where it 
is the " Lawyer Giles, the elderly ragamuffin," 
who, with the rest of the lazy regiment from 
the village tavern, came in response to the sum- 
mons of the "boy Joe" to see poor Brand re- 
turned from his long search after the Unpardon- 
able Sin. This " boy Joe," son of ♦* Bertram 
the lime-burner," was also a bar-room character, 
noted here by Hawthorne, but obviously for a 
different use than that made of him in " Ethan 
Brand," — a reference to him in the " Note- 
Books" being supplemented by this memoran- 
162 



Characters and Scenes 

dum : " take this boy as the germ of a tavern- 
haunter, a country roue, to spend a wild and 
brutal youth, ten years of his prime in prison 
and his old age in the poor-house." This 
sketch may have been written in the spirit of 
prophecy, so exactly has the life of one bar-room 
boy coincided with Hawthorne's outlin-e ; the 
career of another lad whom he here saw and pos- 
sibly had in mind was happier. 

A modern hotel has replaced the " Whig 
Tavern" of Hawthorne's time, and a new set of 
habitues now frequent its bar-room ; another 
generation of fat men has succeeded the in- 
dividuals whose breadth of back was a marvel 
to the novelist, and in the increased population 
of the place the " many obese" would no longer 
provoke comment. The lapsing decades have 
expanded the pretty and busy factory-village he 
found into a prettier and busier factory-city 
without materially changing its prevailing air. 
The vigorous young city has not wholly out- 
grown the " hollow vale" walled in by tower- 
ing mountains ; the aspect of its grand environ- 
ment is therefore essentially unaltered, and it 
chances that there is scarcely a spot, in or about 
the town, which received the notice of Haw- 
thorne which may not still be identified. It 
is our crowning pleasure in the resplendent 
163 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

autumn days to follow his thoughtful step and 
dreamy vision through town and country-side to 
the spots he frequented and described, thus 
sharing, in a way, his companionship and be- 
holding through his eyes the beauties which he 
has depicted of mountain and vale, forest and 
stream. On the summit of a hill in the village 
cemetery, where white gravestones gleam amid 
the evergreens, the grave of a child at whose 
burial Hawthorne assisted is pointed out by 
one who was present with him. The well- 
known author-divine Washington Gladden, some- 
time preached in a near-by church. The ever- 
varying phases of the heights which look down 
upon the town — the wondrous play of light 
and shade upon the great sweeps of foliage 
which clothe the mountain-sides, the shadows 
chasing each other along the slopes and changing 
from side to side as the day declines, until the 
vale lies in twilight while the near summits are 
gilded with sunset gold, the exquisite cloud-eiFects 
as the fleecy masses drift above the ridges or 
cling to the higher peaks — were a never-failing 
source of pleasure to Hawthorne, as they are to 
the loiterer of this day. Every shifting of the 
point of view as we stroll in the town reveals 
a new aspect of its mountain ramparts and 
arouses fresh delight. Hawthorne thought the 
164 



Hawthorne's Rambles 

village itself most beautiful when clouds deeply- 
shaded the mountains while sunshine flooded 
the valley and, by contrast, made streets and 
houses a bright, rich gold. 

The investing mountains give to the place 
the " snug and insular" air which Hawthorne 
observed; from many points it seems com- 
pletely severed from the rest of the world. On 
some dark days sombre banks of cloud settle 
along the ridges and apparently so strengthen 
and heighten the beleaguering walls that we re- 
call Hawthorne's fancy that egress is impossible 
save by " climbing above the clouds." However, 
the railways tunnel the base of one mountain 
and curve around the flanks of others, while 

*'01d roads winding, as old roads will," 

find easy grades about and over the ramparts, 
so that the bustling " Tunnel-city" is by no 
means isolated from the outside world. 

The rambles among and beyond these invest- 
ing mountains, by which Hawthorne made him- 
self and " Eustace Bright" of " Wonder-Book" 
and " Tanglewood Tales" familiar with " rough, 
rugged, broken, headlong" Berkshire, were usu- 
ally solitary. The before-mentioned admirer 
of the " Gentle Boy" sometimes offered to guide 
the novelist to places of interest in the vicinage, 
1 6s 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

but he usually preferred to be alone with nature 
and his own reveries. Once when the lad pro- 
posed to pilot him to the peak of Graylock, 
Hawthorne replied he *' did not care to soar so 
high ; the Bellows-Pipe was sightly enough for 
him." He visited the latter point many times ; 
it is a long walk from the village, and once 
he returned so late that the hotel was closed 
for the night and our lad pommelled the door 
for him until the landlord descended, in wrath 
and confidentially scant attire, to admit the nov- 
elist. 

One starless night we were guided to the kiln 
of ** Bertram the lime-burner" which Haw- 
thorne visited with Mr. Leach, — one of several 
kilns high up on the steep slope without the 
town, where the marble of the mountain is 
converted into snow-white lime. The graphic 
imagery of the tale may all be realized here 
upon the spot where it is laid. Amid the dark- 
ness, the iron door which encloses the glowing 
limestone apparently opens into the mountain- 
side, and seems a veritable entrance to the in- 
fernal regions whose lurid flames escape by 
every crevice. The dark and silent figure, re- 
vealed to us by the weird light, sitting and 
musing before the kiln, is surely ** Ethan Brand" 
on his solitary vigil, intent on perilous thoughts 
i66 



Ethan Brand — Graylock 

as he looks into the flame, or mutely listening 
to the fiend he has evoked from the fire to tell 
him of the Unpardonable Sin ; or it is the same 
Brand returned to the foot of Graylock after 
eighteen years of weary searching abroad, to 
find the Sin in his own heart and to burn that 
heart into snowy whiteness and purity in the 
kiln he had watched so long. As we ponder 
the scene we would scarce be surprised to wit- 
ness the approach of the village rabble led by 
Joe, the old Jew exhibiting his " peep-show" at 
the foot of the kiln, and the self-pursuing cur 
violently chasing his own shortened tail, or to 
hear the demoniac laughter of Brand which 
scattered the terror-stricken rabble in the sur- 
rounding darkness. Certain it is that, thirteen 
years before he wrote the tale, Hawthorne saw 
here, at a kiln on the foot-hill of Graylock, his 
*' Bertram," and heard the legend of a demented 
creature who threw himself into the midst of 
the circle of fire. The name *' Ethan Brand" 
was that of an old resident of Hawthorne's 
Salem. 

The summit of Graylock, whose rugged beauty 
has been sung by Holmes, Thoreau, Bryant, and 
Fanny Kemble, had for Hawthorne a sort of 
fascination. From the streets of the village, 
from all the ways by which he sauntered through 
167 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

the Gountry-side, his eyes were continually turn- 
ing to that lofty height, observant of its ever- 
changing aspects. His diary of the time abounds 
with records of its phases, presented in varying 
conditions of cloud and sunshine and from dif- 
ferent places of prospect, and of the fanciful 
impressions suggested to his subtile thought by 
each fresh and unfamiliar appearance. A walk 
repeatedly enjoyed by him is along a primitive 
road on the mountain-side to the southern end 
of The Notch, — " where it slopes upward to 
the skies," — whence he could see most of the 
enchanting valley of Berkshire — with its lakes, 
embowered villages, and billowy expanses of 
upland and mead — extending between mountain- 
borders to the great Dome which looms across 
it sixty miles away. In the distance he could 
see the crags of Bryant's Monument Mountain 
— the " headless sphinx" of his own " Wonder- 
Book" — rising above the gleaming lake whose 
margin was to be his later home. 

Our route to the peak of Graylock is that 
taken by Hawthorne and Thoreau through the 
savage cleft of The Notch. We follow up a 
dashing mountain-stream past a charming cascade 
beneath darkening hemlocks, then along a rough 
road by the houses whose inhabitants Haw- 
thorne thought ** ought to be temperance people" 
1 68 



Natural Bridge 

from the quality of the water they gave him to 
drink. In the remoter parts of the glen a 
stranger-pedestrian is still a wonder, and will 
be regarded as curiously as was the romancer. 
From the extremity of The Notch, Graylock 
rises steeply, his sides clothed with forests, 
through which we climb to the summit and our 
reward. From the site of Thoreau's bivouac, 
where Fanny Kemble once declaimed Romeo 
and Juliet to a picnic party, we behold a scene 
of unrivalled vastness and beauty, — on every side 
peak soaring beyond peak until the shadowy 
outlines blend with the distant sky. The view 
ranges from Grand Monadnock and the misty 
Adirondacks to the Catskills, the Dome of Mount 
Washington, and the far-away hills of Connec- 
ticut, while at our feet smiles the bright valley, 
as beautiful as that in which Rasselas dwelt. 

A mile from the town we find one of the 
most picturesque spectacles in New England, 
the Natural Bridge, to which Hawthorne came 
again and again during his sojourn in this region. 
Amid a grove of pines apparently rooted in 
the solid rock, a tributary of the Hoosac has, 
during measureless eons of time, worn in the 
white marble a chasm sixty feet deep and fifteen 
feet wide, spanned at one point by a beautifully 
arched mass which forms a bridge high above 
169 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

the stream which frets along the rock-strewn 
floor of the canyon. Within the ravine the 
brook falls in a rainbow-crowned cascade, and 
below this is a placid pool with margins of 
polished marble, where Hawthorne once medi- 
tated a bath, but, alarmed by the approach of 
visitors, he hastily resumed his habiliments, 
" not caring to be to them the most curious 
part of the spectacle." 

From the deep bed of the brook the gazer 
looks heavenward between lofty walls of crys- 
talline whiteness which seem to converge as they 
rise, whose surmounting crags jutting from the 
verge are crowned by sombre evergreens which 
overhang the chasm and almost shut out the sky. 
As we traverse the gorge whose wildness so 
impressed Hawthorne and listen to the re-echo- 
ing roar of the now diminished stream, we are 
reminded of his conceit that the scene is ** like 
a heart that has been rent asunder by a torrent 
of passion which has raged and left ineffaceable 
traces, though now there is but a rill of feeling 
at the bottom." 

Our way back to the town is along a riotous 
stream which took strong hold upon the liking 
of the novelist, by which he often walked and 
in whose cool depths he bathed. His brief 
descriptions of its secluded and turbulent course, 
170 



Incidents and Characters of Tales 

through resounding hollows, amid dark woods, 
under pine-crowned cliffs, — *' talking to itself of 
its own wild fantasies in the voice of solitude 
and the wilderness," — although written at the 
time but for his own perusal, are among the 
gems of the language. Farther down, the bois- 
terous stream is now subdued and harnessed by 
man and made to turn wheels of factories ; its 
limpid w^aters are discolored by dye-stuffs ; its 
beauty is lost with its freedom ; it becomes useful 
and — ugly. 

One day our excursion is into the romantic 
valley of the Deerfield by the old stage-road 
over the Hoosac range, the route which Haw- 
thorne took with his friends Birch and Leach. 
The many turns by which the road accom- 
plishes the ascent afford constantly varying 
vistas of the valley out of which we rise, and 
progressively widening prospects of the forest- 
clad mountains beyond. At the summit we are 
in the centre of the magnificent panorama of 
mountains — glowing now with autumnal crim- 
son and gold — which extorted from Henry 
Clay the declaration that he had " never beheld 
anything so beautiful." 

On the bare and wind-swept plain which lies 
along the summit are a few farm-dwellings. 
Among these at the time of Hawthorne's visit 
171 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

— before the great tunnel had pierced the moun- 
tain and superseded the stage-route — was a 
homely wayside inn, afterward a farm-house, at 
whose bar passengers were wont to " wet their 
whistles." It may be assumed that the ro- 
mancer and his companions failed not to con- 
form to this time-honored custom, for it was in 
that rude bar-room — since a farm-kitchen — that 
Hawthorne met the itinerant Jew with a diorama 
of execrable scratchings which he carried upon 
his back and exhibited as "specimens of the 
fine arts ;" in that room also the novelist wit- 
nessed the whimsical performance of the usually 
sensible and sedate old dog, who periodically 
broke out in an infuriated pursuit of his own 
tail, ** as if one half of his body were at 
deadly enmity with the other.'* These inci- 
dents were carefully noted at the time for pos- 
sible future use, and in such choice diction that 
when, many years afterward, he wove them into 
the fabric of a tale of " The Snow Image'* 
volume, he transcribed them from his diary to 
his manuscript essentially unchanged. This in- 
stance illustrates the method of this consummate 
literary artist and his alertness to perceive and 
utilize the details of real life. His journ-als 
abundantly show that he was by no means the 
aphelxian dreamer he has been adjudged. 
172 



Deerfield Arch — Williamstown 

As we descend into the deep valley we find a 
wild gulf where a brooklet from the top of 
Hoosac falls a hundred ftet into a rock-bordered 
pool, whence it hastens to lose itself in the 
river ; and a mile or two farther along the Deer- 
field we come to the Natural Arch which Haw- 
thorne visited. It is in one of the wildest parts 
of the picturesque valley, where mountain-walls 
rise a thousand feet on either side. Through 
a mass of rock projecting from the margin the 
stream has wrought for itself a symmetrically 
arched passage as large as and very like the door- 
way of an Old- World cathedral. The summit 
of the arch arid the water-worn pillars upon 
either side <lisplay *' pot-holes" and other evi- 
dences of erosion, and in the bed of the current 
lie fragments of similarly attrite rocks which 
seem to indicate that at some period a series of 
arches spanned the entire space from mountain 
to mountain. Hawthorne's pleasing fancy makes 
this arch the entrance to an enchanted palace 
which has all vanished except the door-way 
that ** now opens only into nothingness and 
empty space." 

On other days our saunterings follow Haw- 
thorne's to beautiful Williamstown and through 
the picturesque scenery which environs it. 
Within the park-like village the alma mater of 
173 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

Bryant, Garfield, and Hawthorne*s ** Eustace 
Bright" stands embowered in noble elms and 
overlooked by mighty Graylock. Viewed from 
here, Emerson thought Graylock " a serious 
mountain." Thoreau considered its proximity 
worth at least " one endowed professorship ; it 
were as well to be educated in the shadow of a 
mount as in more classic shades. Some will 
remember not only that they went to the college 
but that they went to the mountain." Haw- 
thorne visited both. At the college commence- 
ment we find him more attentive to the eccen- 
tric characters in the assemblage without the 
church than to the literary exercises within, as 
evidenced by his piquant description of the 
enterprising pedler with the " heterogeny" of 
wares, the gingerbread man, the negroes, and 
other oddities of the out- door company. 

About us here lie the scenes which stirred 
in William Cullen Bryant that intense love of 
nature which inspired his best stanzas. A win- 
some walk brings us to a sequestered glen where 
a brooklet winds amid moss-covered rocks and 
dainty ferns, and mirrors in its clear pools the 
overhanging boughs and the patches of azure ; 
this was a favorite haunt of the youthful Bryant, 
and here he pondered or composed his earlier 
poems, including some portion of the matchless 
174 



Bryant — Emerson 

«* Thanatopsis." Here Emerson, lingering un- 
der the spell of the spot, was moved to recite 
Wordsworth^s " Excursion" to a companion, 
who must evermore feel an enviable thrill when 
he recalls the exquisite lines falling from the 
lips of the " great evangel and seer" amid the 
loveliness of such a scene. 



»75 



II 

LENOX AND MIDDLE BERK- 
SHIRE 



Beloved of the Litterateurs — La Mahon Rouge — Where 
The House of the Seven Gables zvas written- fVonder- 
Book and Tangletvood Scenes — The Bowl — Beecher' s 
Laurel Lake — Kemble — Bryant'' s Monument Mountain — 
Stockbridge — Catherine Sedgwick — Melville's Piassza 
and Chimney - Holmes - Longfellow - Pittsfield. 

WE have only to accompany Eustace Bright 
of" Wonder-Book" from Williams Col- 
lege to his home, where Catherine Sedgwick's 
" Stockbridge Bowl" nestles among the summer- 
enchanted hills of central Berkshire, to find the 
abode of Hawthorne during the most fertile 
period of his life. This region of inspiring 
landscapes has long been a favorite residence of 
litterateurs. Here Jonathan Edwards compiled 
his predestined treatises ; here Catherine Sedg- 
wick wrote the romances which charmed her 
generation ; here Elihu Burritt " the Learned 
Blacksmith," wrought out the "Sparks" that 
made him famous ; here Bryant composed his 
best stanzas and made Monument Mountain and 
Green River classic spots ; here Henry Ward 
Beecher indited many " Star Papers ;" here Her- 
176 



Hawthorne's Return to Berkshire 

man Melville produced his sea-tales and brilliant 
essays ; here Headley and Holmes, Lowell and 
Longfellow, Curtis and James, Audubon and 
Whipple, Mrs. Sigourney and Martineau, Fanny 
Kemble and Frederika Bremer, the gifted sisters 
Goodale, and many other shining spirits, have 
had home or haunt and have invested the scenery 
with the splendors of their genius. Half a 
score of this galaxy were in Berkshire at the 
time of Hawthorne's residence there. 

After his sojourn in northern Berkshire he 
returned to Salem, where he married the lovely 
Sophia Peabody, endured some years of custom- 
house drudgery, and wrote the ** Scarlet Letter," 
which made him famous : he then sought again 
the seclusion of the mountains. 

Poverty, which he had long and bravely 
endured, has been assigned as the cause of his 
removal to the humble Berkshire abode in 1850 ; 
one writer refers to the slenderness of his larder 
here, another says the rent for his poor dwelling 
was paid by his friends, another that the rent was 
remitted by the owner, who was his friend. But 
the success of the " Scarlet Letter" had relieved 
the necessitous condition of its author ; and his 
landlord here — Tappan of " Tanglewood" — 
testifies and Hawthorne's letters show that he 
was able to pay his rent. His motive in return- 
M. 177 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

ing to Berkshire is stated in a letter to Bridge : 
" I have taken a house in Lenox — I long to get 
into the country, for my health is not what it 
has been. An hour or two of labor in a garden 
and a daily ramble in country air would keep 
me all right." Doubtless, too, he hoped to find 
the quiet and seclusion of the place favorable 
for his work. 

The habitation to which he brought his 
family he describes as " the very ugliest little 
bit of an old red farm-house you ever saw," 
" the most inconvenient and wretched hovel I 
ever put my head in." His wife's letters char- 
acterize it, "the reddest and smallest of 
houses," with such a low stud that she " fears 
to be crushed." 

In later years we have found it scarcely 
changed since Hawthorne's occupancy ; it was 
indeed of the humblest and plainest, — a low- 
eaved, one-and-a-half-storied structure, with a 
lower wing at the side, dingy red in color, with 
window-shutters of green. The interior was 
cosy and more commodious than the exterior 
would indicate, and one could readily conceive 
that the artistic taste and deft fingers of Mrs. 
Hawthorne might create here the idyllic home 
her letters portray. We have been indebted 
to the courtesy of Hawthorne's friend Tappan 
178 



His Home and Study 

for glimpses of the rooms which Mrs. Haw- 
thorne had already made familiar to us : the 
tiny reception-room, where she ** sewed at her 
stand and read to the children about Christ ;" 
the drawing-room, where she disposed " the 
embroidered furniture," and where, in the far- 
ther corner, stood ** Apollo with his head tied 
on ;" the dining-room, where the " Pembroke 
table stood between the windows ;" the small 
boudoir, with its enchanting outlook ; the " golden 
chamber" where the baby Rose was born ; the 
room of the *' little lady Una ;" and the low, 
dingy apartment which was the study of the 
master-genius. Of this room she says, " it can 
boast of nothing but his presence in the morn- 
ing and the picture out of the window in the 
evening." His secretary was so placed that as 
he sat at his work he could look out upon a 
landscape of forest and meadow, lake and moun- 
tain, as beautiful as a poet's dream. It was the 
exquisite loveliness of this scene — which Haw- 
thorne thought surpassed all others in Berkshire 
— that for a time reconciled him to the deficien- 
cies of his situation here. 

Monument Mountain, looming almost across 

the valley, is the most prominent feature of this 

view, and it was from his study window that 

he noted most of its varying aspects which are 

179 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

depicted in the ** Wonder-Book" and in his let- 
ters and journals. Its contour is to him that of 
a " huge, headless sphinx," and when — as on 
the days we beheld it from his window — it 
blazes from base to summit with the resplendent 
hues of autumn, his fancy suggested that *' the 
sphinx is wrapped in a rich Persian shawl ;" 
with the sunshine upon it, " it has the aspect 
of burnished copper ;" now it has " a fleece of 
sun-brightened mist," again it seems " founded 
on a cloud ;" on other days it is " enveloped as 
if in the smoke of a great battle." Upon the 
pane through which he had looked upon these 
changeful phases his hand inscribed, ** Na- 
thaniel Hawthorne, February 9, 1851." 

He could scarcely have found a lovelier loca- 
tion for his home. The valley, which some- 
times seemed to him ** a vast basin filled with 
sunshine as with wine," is enclosed by groups 
of mountains piled and terraced to the horizon. 
As we behold them in the splendor of the 
October days, great patches of sunshine and 
sable cloud-shadows flit along the glowing slopes 
in the sport of the wind. On the one side, the 
ground sweeps upward from the cottage site to 
the " Bald Summit" of the " Wonder-Book ;" on 
the other, a meadow — as long as the finger of 
the giant of " Three Golden Apples" — slopes 
180 



Site of his Little Red House 

to the lake a furlong distant. That beautiful 
water, sung by Sigourney, Sedgwick, and F^nny 
Kemble, stretches its bays three miles among 
the hills to the southward and mirrors its own 
wooded margins and the farther mountains. 
Beyond the lake, rising in mid-air like a great 
gray wall, are the sheer precipices of Monu- 
ment Mountain, and in the hazy distance the 
loftier Taconics uprear their grand Dome in the 
illimitable blue. 

Of " La Maison Rouge" of Hawthorne's 
letters, the pilgrim of to-day finds only the 
blackened and broken foundation walls : a de- 
vouring fire, from which Tappan saved little of 
his furniture, has laid it low. These walls 
(which remain only because relic-hunters cannot 
easily carry them away) measurably indicate the 
form and dimensions of the cottage and its gen- 
eral arrangement. Its site is close upon the 
highway, from which it is partially screened by 
evergreen trees. The gate of the enclosure is 
of course an unworthy successor to that upon 
which Fields found Hawthorne swinging his 
children, but these near-by elms have shaded 
the great romancer, the tallest of the evergreens 
is the tree his wife thought '* full of a thousand 
memories,'* and all about the spot cluster re- 
minders of the simple, healthful life Hawthorne 
i8i 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

led here. Here ^re the garden ground he tilled 
and where he buried the pet rabbit " Bunny ;" 
the " patch," ploughed for him by Tappan, 
where he raised beans for himself and corn for 
his hens (he had learned something of agricult- 
ure at Brook Farm, albeit it was said there he 
could do nothing but feed the hogs) ; the now 
great fruit-trees whose leaden labels little Julian 
destroyed, as Tappan remembers ; the place of 
the " scientific hennery," fitted up by the <* Man 
of Genius and the Naval Officer," — Hawthorne 
and Horatio Bridge ; the long declivity where 
the novelist as well as his Eustace Bright used 
to coast ** in the nectared air of winter" with 
the children of the " Wonder-Book ;" the leafy 
woods — his refuge from visitors — where he 
walked with his children and where Bright 
nutted with the little Pringles ; the lake-shore 
where Hawthorne loitered or lay extended in 
the shade during summer hours, ** smoking cigars, 
reading foolish novels, and thinking of nothing 
at all," while the children played about him or 
covered his chin and breast with long grasses to 
make him " look like the mighty Pan." 

Near by are other friends he has made known 
to us. Yonder copse shades a narrow glen 
whose braes border a brooklet winding and 
chattering on its way to the lake ; this glen was 



Tanglewood and Wonder-Book Scenes 

a summer haunt of Hawthorne, where he doubt- 
less pondered much of his work. Here he 
brought his children " to play with the brook" 
and helped them to build water-falls, or reclined 
in the shade and told them stories as described in 
the " Wonder-Book,"— for this is the " dell of 
Shadow-Brook," where the children picnicked 
with Bright and where he told them the story 
of ** The Golden Touch" on such an afternoon 
as this, on which we behold the dell thickly 
strewn with golden leaves, as if King Midas had 
newly emptied his coffers there. 

Yonder mansion of Hawthorne's landlord, 
just beyond the highway, is " Tanglewood," 
— place of the Pringles* home and still the 
abode of Tappan's daughters, — where Bright 
spent his vacations and where Hawthorne makes 
him tell many of the " Tales." The view de- 
scribed on the porch, where the " Gorgon's 
Head" was narrated, is the one Hawthorne saw 
from his study window. Glimpses of various 
rooms of the mansion which Tappan then in- 
habited and called " Highwood" are prefixed to 
the stories told in them. Beyond ** Tangle- 
wood" steeply rises an eminence whose bare 
acclivity Hawthorne often climbed with his 
family, — the " Bald Summit" where the Pringles 
listened to the tale of " The Chimera." We 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

ascend by the novelist's accustomed way " through 
Luther Butler's orchard," and are repaid by a 
view extending from the mountains of Vermont 
to the Catskills and deserving the high praise 
Hawthorne bestowed. A golden cloud floating 
close to Graylock's shaggy head reminds us 
of Hawthorne's conceit that a mortal might 
step from the mountain to the cloud and thus 
ascend heavenly heights. The farther ranges 
enclose a valley of wave-like hills, — which look 
as if a tumultuous ocean had been transfixed and 
solidified, — dotted with farmsteads and pictu- 
resque villages whose white spires rise from 
embowering trees. At our feet the " Bowl" 
ripples and scintillates, farther away the '* Echo 
Lake" of Christine Nilsson and many smaller 
lakelets ** open their blue eyes to the sun,'* 
while the placid stream, fringed by overhanging 
willows, circles here and there through the 
valley like a shining ribbon. Here we may 
realize the immensity of Hawthorne's giant in 
the " Three Golden Apples," who was so tall 
he " might have seated himself on Taconic and 
had Monument Mountain for a footstool." 

Not far away, near another shore of the 

shimmering ** Bowl," that versatile genius " Carl 

Benson" — Charles Astor Bristed — dwelt for 

some time in a quaint old farm-house which has 

1S4 



Resorts and Reminiscences 

since been destroyed by fire, and here accom- 
plished some of his literary work. Laurel Lake 
(the Scott*s Pond of Hawthorne's " Note- 
Books"), where Beecher " bought a hundred 
acres to lie down upon," — and called them 
Blossom Farm in the " Star Papers" written 
there, — was another resort of Hawthorne. We 
find it a pretty water, although its margins are 
mostly denuded of large trees. A bright matron 
of the vicinage, who, when a child, thought the 
author of the " Wonder-Book" the *' greatest man 
in the world save only Franklin Pierce," lived 
then by Hawthorne's road to Laurel Lake. 
Her admiration for him (heightened by his 
intimacy with Pierce) led her to daily watch 
the road by which he would come from Tangle- 
wood, and when she saw him approaching — 
which would be twice a week in good weather 
— she would go into the yard and reverently 
gaze at him until his swift gait had carried him 
out of sight. To her he was a tall, dark man 
with a handsome clean-shaven face and lustrous 
eyes which saw nothing but the ground directly 
before him, habitually dressed in black, with a 
wide-brimmed soft hat. Usually his walk was 
solitary, but sometimes Herman Melville, who 
was well known in the neighborhood, was his 
companion, and one autumn he was twice or 
i8s 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

thrice accompanied by '* a light spare man," — 
the poet Ellery Channing. Once Hawthorne 
strode past toward the lake when Fanny Kemble, 
who lived near by, rode her black steed by his 
side and ** seemed to be doing all the talking" 
— she was capable of that — and '* was talking 
politics." Having secured a Democratic auditor, 
she doubtless " improved the occasion" with 
her habitual vivaciousness. A neighbor of Haw- 
thorne's tells us this incident of the following 
year, when the novelist's friend Pierce had been 
named for the Presidency. One dark night this 
neighbor went on foot to a campaign lecture at 
Lenox Furnace. At its close, he essayed to 
shorten the homeward walk by a " short cut" 
across the fields, and, of course, lost his way. 
Descrying a light, he directed his steps toward 
it, but found himself involved in a labyrinth of 
obstacles, and had to make so many detours that 
when he finally reached the house whence the 
light proceeded, and when in response to his 
hail the door was opened by Kemble herself, 
he was so distraught and amazed at being lost 
among his own farms that he could hardly ex- 
plain his plight; but she quickly interrupted 
his incoherent account : " Yes, I see, poor be- 
nighted man ! you've been to a Democratic 
meeting ; no wonder you are bewildered ! Now 
iS6 



Fanny Kemble — Monument Mountain 

I'll lend you a good Whig lantern that will light 
you safe home." We find Mrs. Kemble-But- 
ler's " Perch" — as she named her home here — 
a little enlarged, but not otherwise changed since 
the time of her occupancy. She was a general 
favorite, and her dark steed, which had cost her 
the proceeds of a volume of her poems, used to 
stop before every house in the vicinage. She 
often came, habited in a sort of bloomer cos- 
tume which shocked some of her friends, to 
fish in the " Bowl" at the time Hawthorne 
dwelt by its shore. 

The death of Louis Kossuth, some time ago, 
reminded her former neighbors here that she led 
the dance with him at a ball in Lenox, when 
the exiled patriot was a guest of the Sedgwicks. 

Our approach to Monument Mountain is 
along one of those sequestered by-ways which 
Hawthorne loved, with " an unseen torrent 
roaring at an unseen depth" near by. A rift in 
the morning mists which enshroud the valley dis- 
plays the mountain summit bathed in sunshine. 
We ascend by Bryant's " path which conducts 
up the narrow battlement to the north," the 
same along which Hawthorne and his friends — 
Holmes, James T. Fields, Sedgwick, and the 
rest — were piloted by the historian Headley on a 
summer's day more than forty years ago. Stand- 
187 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

ing upon the beetling verge, which is scarred and 
splintered by thunderbolts and overhangs a preci- 
pice of five hundred feet or more, we look 
abroad upon a landscape of wondrous expanse 
and beauty. Here we may realize all the pros- 
pect Bryant portrayed as he stood upon this 
spot : 

** A beautiful river 
Wanders amid the fresh and fertile meads ; 

On either side 
The fields swell upward to the hills j beyond, 
Above the hills, in the blue distance, rise 
The mighty columns with which earth props heaven.** 

In the middle distance, across the Bowl, which 
gleams a veritable " mountain mirror," we see 
the site of the home whence Hawthorne so 
often looked upon these cliffs. Yonder de- 
tached pinnacle, rising from the base of the 
precipice beneath us, is the " Pulpit Rock" 
which Catherine Sedgwick christened when 
Hawthorne*s party picnicked here ; from the 
crag projecting from the verge Fanny Kemble 
declaimed Bryant's poem, and Herman Mel- 
ville, bestriding the same rock for a bowsprit, 
** pulled and hauled imaginary ropes" for the 
amusement of the company. Among these 
splintered masses the company lunched that day 
and drank quantities of Heidsieck to the health 
i88 



Hawthorne at Stockbridge 

of the " dear old poet of Monument Moun- 
tain." On the east, almost within sight from 
this eminence, is the spot where he was born, 
near the birthplaces of Warner and the gifted 
Mrs. Howe. 

Another day we follow the same brilliant 
party of Hawthorne's friends through the Stock- 
bridge Ice Glen, — a narrow gorge which cleaves 
a rugged mountain from base to summit, its riven 
sides being apparently held asunder by immense 
rocky masses hurled upon each other in wild con- 
fusion. Beneath are weird grottos and great re- 
cesses which the sun never penetrates, and within 
these we make our way — clambering and sliding 
over huge boulders — through the heart of the 
mountain. One of Hawthorne's company here 
testifies that in all the extemporaneous jollity of 
the scramble through the glen the usually silent 
novelist was foremost, and, being sometimes in 
the dark, dared use his tongue, — " calling out 
lustily and pretending that certain destruction 
threatened us all. I never saw him in better 
spirits than throughout this day." 

From the glen we trace Hawthorne to the 
staid old house of Burr's boyhood, where lived 
and wrote Jonathan Edwards, and the statelier 
dwelling whence Catherine Sedgwick gave her 
tales to the world. Near by we find the grave 
189 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

where she lies amid the scenes of her own 
" Hope Leslie," and not far from the sojourn 
of her gifted niece whose translation of Sand's 
" Fadette" has been so well received. Over- 
looking the village is the summer residence of 
Field of the " Evangelist," — author of the de- 
lightful books of travel. 

Farther away is a little farm-house, with a 
** huge, corpulent, old Harry VHI. of a chim- 
ney," to which Hawthorne was a frequent visi- 
tor, — the " Arrow-Head" of Herman Melville. 
" Godfrey Graylock" says the friendship be- 
tween Hawthorne and Melville originated in 
their taking refuge together, during an electric 
shower, in a narrow cleft of Monument Moun- 
tain. They had been coy of each other on ac- 
count of Melville's review of the " Scarlet Let- 
ter" in Duyckinck's Literary World , but during 
some hours of enforced intercourse and pro- 
pinquity in very contracted quarters they dis- 
covered in each other a correlation of thought 
and feeling which made them fast friends for 
life. Thereafter Melville was often at the little 
red house, where the children knew him as 
" Mr. Omoo," and less often Hawthorne came 
to chat with the racy romancer and philosopher 
by the great chimney. Once he was accom- 
panied by little Una — " Onion" he sometimes 
190 



Melville's Arrow-Head — Pittsfield 

called her — and remained a whole week. This 
visit — certainly unique in the life of the shy 
Hawthorne — was the topic when, not so long 
agone, we last looked upon the living face of 
Melville in his city home. March weather 
prevented walks abroad, so the pair spent most 
of the week in smoking and talking metaphysics 
in the barn, — Hawthorne usually lounging upon 
a carpenter's bench. When he was leaving, he 
jocosely declared he would write a report of 
their psychological discussions for publication 
in a volume to be called '* A Week on a Work- 
Bench in a Barn," the title being a travesty upon 
that of Thoreau's then recent book, " A Week 
on Concord River," etc. 

Sitting upon the north piazza, of " Piazza 
Tales," at Arrow-Head, where Hawthorne and 
his friend lingered in summer days, we look 
away to Graylock and enjoy " the calm prospect 
of things from a fair piazza" which Melville so 
whimsically describes. At Arrow-Head, too, 
we find the astonishing chimney which suggested 
the essay, still occupying the centre of the house 
and " leaving only the odd holes and corners" 
to Melville's nieces, who now inhabit the place 
in summer ; the study where Hawthorne and 
Melville discussed the plot of the " White 
Whale" and other tales ; the great fireplace, 
191 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

with its inscriptions from ** I and my Chim- 
ney ;" the window-view of Melville's ** October 
Mountain," — beloved of Longfellow, — whose 
autumn glories inspired that superb word-picture 
and metaphysical sketch. 

On a near knoll, commanding a view of the 
circle of mountains and the winding river, stands 
the sometime summer residence of Holmes 
among his ancestral acres, where Hawthorne 
and Fields came to visit him. His " den," in 
which he did much literary work, overlooks the 
beautiful meadows, and is now expanded into a 
large library, while the trees he planted are 
grown to be the crowning beauty of the place, 
which the owner calls Holmesdale. It was the 
hereditary home of the Wendells. 

Beyond, at the edge of the town of Pittsfield, 
is the mansion where Longfellow found his wife 
and his famous " Old Clock on the Stairs." At 
the Athenaeum in the town some thousands of 
Holmes's books will soon be placed, and here is 
preserved the secretary from Hawthorne's study 
in the little red house, — a time-worn mahogany 
combination of desk, drawers, and shelves, at 
which he wrote " The House of the Seven 
Gables," "The Wonder-Book," "The Snow 
Image," and part of "The Blithedale Ro- 
mance." Pittsfield was long the home of 
J92 



Hawthorne's Habit of Meditation 

" Godfrey Graylock ;" here the gifted Rose 
Terry Cooke passed her closing years of life 
with her husband, and not far away Josh Bil- 
lings, " the Yankee Solomon," was born and 
reared as Henry Savage Shaw. One day we 
trace from Pittsfield the footsteps of Hawthorne 
and Melville across the Taconics to the whilom 
home of " Mother Ann" and to the higher 
Hancock peaks. 

Hawthorne's daily walk to the post-office was 
past the later residence of Charlotte Cushman, 
and by the church where the older Channing 
delivered his last discourse and where twenty 
years ago Parkhurst was preacher. In the 
church-tower Fanny Kemble*s clock still tells 
the hours above the lovely spot where she de- 
sired to be buried. 

These various excursions compass the range 
of Hawthorne's rambles in this region : he was 
never ten miles away from the little red house 
during his residence here. Obviously he pre- 
ferred short and solitary strolls which allowed 
undisturbed meditation upon the work in hand. 
The quantity and finish of the writing done 
here indicate that much thought was expended 
upon it outside his study. We may be sure that 
upon " The House of the Seven Gables" were 
bestowed, besides the five months of daily sessions 
N 193 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

at his desk, other months of study and thought 
as he strolled the country roads and loitered by 
the lake-side or in the dell of " Blossom-Brook." 
He avowed himself a shameless idler in warm 
weather, declaring he was " good for nothing 
in a literary way until after the autumnal frosts" 
brightened his imagination as they did the foliage 
about him here ; yet the meditations of one 
summer in Berkshire produced his masterpiece, 
and the next summer accomplished The Won- 
der-Book," quickly followed by The Snow 
Image" and ** Blithedale." Durin this summer 
also he had a voluminous co^resp dence with 
the many " Pyncheon jackas es" ho thought 
themselves aggrieved by his use of neir name in 
" The House of the Seven Cables." 

Of the simple home-life at the little red 
house, Hawthorne's diaries . id letters, as well 
as some of the books written ] re, afford pleasing 
glimpses. The " Violet" an . " Peony" of the 
** Snow Image" story are the novelist's own lit- 
tle Una and Julian, and the rale was suggested 
by some occurrence in their play ; the incidents 
related of Eustace Bright and the young Pringles, 
which are prefixed to the " Wonder-Book" 
stories, are merely experiences of Hawthorne 
and his children, and during the composition 
of these tales he delighted these children — as 
194 



Life in the Little Red House 

one of them remembers — by reading to them 
each evening the work of the day. A grim- 
visaged negress named Peters, who was the 
servant here in the little red house, is said to 
have suggested the character of Aunt Keziah 
in " Septimius Felton." 

Hawthorne's chickens receive notice as mem- 
bers of the family in his diary, — thus : ** Seven 
chickens hatched, J. T. Headley called — eight 
chickens ;" ** ascended a mountain with my 
wife, eight ire chickens hatched.'* In a let- 
ter to Hot o Bridge, ** Our children grow 
apace and s do pur chickens ;" " we are so 
intimate wi evej-y individual chicken that it 
seems like mibalism to think of eating one 
of them." Hawthorne's daily walk with pail 
in hand to Lu;her sutler's, the next farm-house, 
he speaks of a^s hi "milky way." Butler lives 
now two miles di ,.^nt. The novelist thus an- 
nounces to his fr nd Bridge the birth of the 
present gifted poet ss, Mrs. Lathrop, the daugh- 
ter of his age : " I\!rs. Hawthorne has published 
a little work which still lies in sheets, but makes 
some noise in the world ; it is a healthy miss 
with no present pretensions to beauty." Five 
cats were cherished by the novelist and his 
children ; a snowy morning after Hawthorne's 
removal, three of the cats came to a neighbor- 
195 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

ing house, where their descendants are still 
petted and cherished. 

A few visitors came to the little red house — 
Kemble, James, Lowell, Holmes, E. P. Whip- 
ple, and the others already mentioned — in whose 
presence the " statue of night and silence" was 
wont to relax, but for the most part his life was 
that of a recluse. Here, as elsewhere, his 
thoughts dwelt apart in "a twilight region" 
where the company of his kind was usually a 
perturbing intrusion. For companionship, his 
family, the lake, the woods, his own thoughts, 
sufficed ; he seldom sought any other, and there- 
fore was unpopular in the neighborhood. It is 
hardly to be supposed that the creator of Zeno- 
bia, Hester Prynne, and the Pyncheons would 
greatly enjoy the society of his rural neighbors, 
but they were not therefore the less displeased 
by his habitually going out of his way — some- 
times across the fields — to avoid meeting them. 
Some of them had a notion that he was the 
author of ** a poem, or an arithmetic, or some 
other kind of a book," — as he makes ** Prim- 
rose Pringle" to say of him in the tale, — but 
to most he was incomprehensible, perhaps a 
little uncanny, and the great genius of romance 
is yet mentioned here as ** a queer sort o' man 
that lived in Tappan's red house." 
196 



Reasons for leaving Berkshire 

His son records that after Hawthorne had 
freed himself from Salem " he soon wearied 
of any particular locality ;" after a time he 
tired even of beautiful Berkshire. Its obtrusive 
scenery ** with the same strong impressions re- 
peated day after day" became irksome ; then he 
grew tired of the mountains and "would joy- 
fully see them laid flat." He writes to Fields, 
** I am sick of Berkshire, and hate to think of 
spending another winter here." Doubtless the 
region which we behold in the glamour of the 
early autumn seemed very different to Haw- 
thorne in the season when he had daily " to 
trudge two miles to the post-office through snow 
or slush knee-deep." Ellery Channing — who 
had knowledge of the winter here — in his 
letters to Hawthorne calls Berkshire " that Sa- 
tanic institution of Spitzbergen," ** that ice- 
plant of the Sedgwicks." 

A more cogent reason for Hawthorne's discon- 
tent here is found in his failing health. He writes 
to Pike, " I am not vigorous as I used to be on the 
coast ;" to Fields, ** For the first time since boy- 
hood I feel languid and dispirited. Oh,that Provi- 
dence would build me the merest shanty and mark 
me out a rood or two of garden near the coast." 

For these and other reasons Hawthorne finally 
left Berkshire at the end of 1851, going first to 
197 



In Berkshire with Hawthorne 

West Newton and a few months later to " the 
Wayside," while his friend Tappan occupied 
the thenceforth famous little red house. 

The world of readers owes much to Haw- 
thorne's residence among the mountains. Be- 
sides the material here gathered and the ex- 
quisite settings for his tales these landscapes 
afforded, we are indebted to his environment in 
Berkshire for the quality of the work here ac- 
complished and for its quantity as well ; for he 
responded so readily to the inspiriting influence 
of his surroundings that he produced more 
during his stay here than at any similar period 
of his life. The soulful beauty and the seclu- 
sion of the haunts to which we here trace him, 
suiting well his solitary mood, may measurably 
account to us for his habit of thought and for 
the manner of expression by which nature was 
here portrayed and life expounded by the great 
master of American romance. 



198 



A DAY WITH THE GOOD 
GRAY POET 



A DAY WITH THE GOOD 
GRAY POET 



TFalk and Talk ivith Socrates in Camden - The Bard's Ap- 
pearance and Surroundings — Recollections of his Life and 
Work - Hospital Service - Praise for his Critics - His 
Literary Habity Purpose j Equipment j and Style — His 
Religious Bent — Readings. 

" TLTOW can you find him? Nothing is 
easier," quoth the Philadelphia friend 
who some time before Whitman's death brought 
us an invitation from the bard ; ** you have only 
to cross the ferry and apply to the first man or 
woman you meet, for there is no one in Cam- 
den who does not know Walt Whitman or who 
would not go out of his way to bring you to 
him." The event justifies the prediction, for 
when we make inquiry of a tradesman standing 
before a shop, he speedily throws aside his apron, 
closes his door against evidently needed custom- 
ers, and — despite our protest — sets out to con- 
duct us to the home of the poet. This is done 
with such obvious ardor that we hint to our guide 
that he must be one of the " Whitmaniacs," 
whereupon he rejoins, " I never read a word 
Whitman wrote. I don't know why they call 
him Socrates, but I do know he never passes me 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

without a friendly nod and a word of greeting 
that warms me all through." We subsequently 
find that it is this sort of ** Whitmania," rather 
than that Swinburne deplores, which pervades 
the vicinage of the poet's home. 

Our conductor leaves us at the door of three 
hundred and twenty-eight Mickle Street, a neat 
thoroughfare bordered by unpretentious frame 
dwellings, hardly a furlong from the Delaware. 
The dingy little two-storied domicile is so disap- 
pointingly different from what we were expecting 
to see that the confirmatory testimony of the name 
<* W. Whitman" upon the door-plate is needed 
to convince us that this is the oft-mentioned 
** neat and comfortable" dwelling of one of the 
world's celebrities. 

We are kept waiting upon the door-step long 
enough to observe that the unpainted boards of 
the house are weather-worn and that the shabby 
window-shutters and the cellar-door, which 
opens aslant upon the sidewalk, are in sad need 
of repair, and then we are admitted by the 
" good, faithful, young Jersey woman who," as 
he lovingly testifies, " cooks for and vigilantly 
sees to" the venerable bard. A moment later 
we are in his presence, in the spacious second- 
story room which is his sleeping apartment and 
work-room. 



Whitman's Personal Appearance 

" You are good to come early while I am 
fresh and rested," exclaims Walt Whitman, 
rising to his six feet of burly manhood and 
advancing a heavy step or two to greet us ; " we 
are going to have a talk, and we have something 
to talk about, you know," referring to a literary 
venture of ours which had procured us the in- 
vitation to visit him. When he has regained 
the depths of his famous and phenomenal chair, 
the " Jersey woman" hands him a score of let- 
ters, which he offers to lay aside, but we insist 
that he shall read them at once, and while he is 
thus occupied we have opportunity to observe 
more closely the bard and his surroundings. 

We see a man made in massive mould, stal- 
wart and symmetrical, — not bowed by the weight 
of time nor deformed by the long years of hemi- 
plegia ; a majestic head, large, leonine, Homeric, 
crowned with a wealth of flowing silvery hair; 
a face like ** the statued Greek" (Bucke says it 
is the noblest he ever saw) ; all the features are 
full and handsome; the forehead, high and 
thoughtful, is marked by " deep furrows which 
life has ploughed ;" the heavy brows are highly 
arched above eyes of gray-blue which in repose 
seem suave rather than brilliant ; the upper lid 
droops over the eye nearly to the pupil, — a con- 
dition which obtains in partial ptosis, — and we 
203 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

afterward observe that when he speaks of mat- 
ters which deeply move him his eyelids have a 
tendency to decline still farther, imparting to 
his eyes an appearance of lethargy altogether at 
variance with the thrilling earnestness and tre- 
mor of his voice. A strong nose, cheeks round 
and delicate, a complexion of florid and trans- 
parent pink, — its hue being heightened by the 
snowy whiteness of the fleecy beard which 
frames the face and falls upon the breast. The 
face is sweet and wholesome rather than refined, 
vital and virile rather than intellectual. Joa- 
quin Miller has said that, even when destitute 
and dying. Whitman " looked like a Titan 
god." 

We think the habitual expression of his face 
to be that of the sage benignity that comes with 
age when life has been well lived and life's work 
well done. The expression bespeaks a soul at 
ease with itself, unbroken by age, poverty, and 
disease, unsoured by calumny and insult. Cer- 
tainly his bufFetings and his brave endurance of 
wrong have left no record of malice or even of 
impatience upon his kindly face. His manly 
form is clad in a loosely fitting suit of gray ; his 
rolling and ample shirt-collar, worn without a 
tie, is open at the throat and exposes the upper 
part of his breast ; all his attire, " from snowy 
204 



His Study and Surroundings 

linen to burnished boot,'* is scrupulously clean 
and neat. 

His room is of generous proportions, occupy- 
ing nearly the entire width of the house, and 
lighted by three windows in front. The floor 
is partly uncarpeted, and the furniture is of 
the simplest ; his bed, covered by a white coun- 
terpane, occupies a corner ; there are two large 
tables ; an immense iron-bound trunk stands by 
one wall and an old-fashioned stove by another ; 
a number of boxes and uncushioned seats are 
scattered through the apartment ; on the walls 
are wardrobe-hooks, shelves, and many pictures, 
— a few fine engravings, a print of the Seminole 
Osceola, portraits of the poet's parents (his 
father's face is a good one) and sisters, and of 
"another — not a sister." 

There are many books here and there, some 
of them well worn ; one corner holds several 
Greek and Latin classics and copies of Burns, 
Tennyson, Scott, Ossian, Emerson, etc. On 
the large table near his chair are his writing 
materials, with the Bible, Shakespeare, Dante, 
and the Iliad within reach. Bundles of papers 
lie in odd places about the room ; piles of books, 
magazines, and manuscripts are heaped high 
upon the tables, litter the chairs, and overflow 
and encumber the floor. This room holds 
205 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

what Whitman has called the " storage collec- 
tion" of his life. 

" And now you are to tell me about yourself 
and your work," says the poet, pushing aside 
his letters. But, although he is the best of lis- 
teners, we are intent to make him talk, and a 
fortunate remark concerning one of his letters 
which had seemed to interest him more than 
the others — it came from a friend of his far-away 
boyhood — enables us to profit by the reminis- 
cential mood the letter has inspired. 

In his low-toned voice he pictures his early 
home, his parents, and his first ventures into the 
world ; with evident relish he narrates his ludi- 
crous experience when he — a stripling school- 
master — "went boarding 'round." Than this, 
there was but one happier period of his life, 
and that was when he drove among the farms 
and villages distributing his Long Islander: 
** that was bliss." 

Later he was a politician and " stumped the 
island" for the Democratic candidates, but the 
enactment of the fugitive slave law disgusted 
him, and he declared his political emancipation 
in the poem " Blood-Money." At odd times 
he has done ** a deal of newspaper drudgery" 
and other work, but his ** forte always was loaf- 
ing and writing poetry, — at least until the war." 
206 



His Recollections 

He began early to clothe his thought in verse, and 
was but a lad when a poem of his was accepted 
for publication in the New York Mirror, and he 
depicts for us the surprised delight with which 
he beheld his stanzas in that fashionable journal. 

A pleasure of those early years was the com- 
panionship of Bryant, and he details to us the 
"glorious walks and talks" they had together 
along the North Shore in sweet summer days. 
This, he says with a sigh, was the dearest of 
the friendships lost to him by the publication of 
" Leaves of Grass ;" ** but there were compen- 
sations, Emerson and Tennyson." Of later 
events he speaks less freely. Of the years of 
devoted service to the wounded and dying in 
army hospitals, when day and night he liter- 
ally gave himself for others, — living upon the 
coarsest fare that he might bestow his earnings 
upon ** his sick boys," — of these years he speaks 
not at all, save as to the causation of his " war 
paralysis." " Yes, it made an old man of me ; 
but I would like to do it all again if there were 
need." Of his long years of suffering and his 
brave and patient confronting of pain, poverty, 
and imminent death, his " Specimen Days" is 
the fitting record. 

Replying to a question concerning a dainty 
volume of his poems which lay near us, and 
aoy 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

which we have been secretly coveting, he says, 
** You know I have never been the fashion ; 
publishers were afraid of me, and I have sold 
the books myself, though I alvv^ays advise people 
not to buy them, for I fear they are worthless." 
But when he writes his name and ours upon the 
title-page, and lays within the cover several por- 
traits taken at different periods of his life, we 
wonder if he can ever know how very far from 
** worthless" the book will be to us. We tender 
in payment a bank-note of larger denomination 
than we could be supposed to possess, with a 
deprecating remark upon the novelty of an 
author's handling a fifty-dollar note, whereupon 
he laughs heartily : *' A novelty to you, is it ? 
I tell you it's an impossibility to me ; why, my 
whole income from my books during a recent 
half-year was only twenty-two dollars and six 
cents : don't forget the six cents," he adds, 
with a twinkle. Then he assures us that he is 
not in want, and that his ** shanty," as he calls 
his home, is nearly paid for. 

He proposes a walk, — *' a hobble" it must 
be for him, — which may afford opportunity to 
change the note ; and as we saunter toward the 
river, he leaning heavily upon his cane, it is a 
pleasure to observe the °vident feeling of liking 
and camaraderie which people have for him. 
208 



Popularity with his Neighbors 

They go out of their way to meet him and to 
receive merely a friendly nod, for he stops to 
speak with none save the children who leave 
their play to run to him. He seems mightily 
amused when one wee toddler calls him " Mister 
Socrates," and he tells us this is the first time he 
has been so addressed, although he understands 
that some of his friends speak of him among 
themselves by the name of that philosopher. 
So far as he knows, the name was first applied 
to him in Buchanan's lines " To Socrates in 
Camden." 

Everywhere we go, on the ferry, at the hotel 
where we lunch, he receives affectionate greet- 
ing from people of every rank, yet he is not 
loquacious, certainly not effusive. He shakes 
hands but once while we are out, and that is 
with an unknown man, and because he // un- 
known, as Whitman afterward tells us. 

During luncheon we speak of a recent visit to 
Mrs, Howarth (the poetess " Clementine"). 
Whitman is at once interested, and questions 
until he has drawn out the pathetic story of her 
struggles with poverty, disease, and impeding 
environment, and then declares he will go to 
see her as soon as he is able. He declines to 
receive a copy of her poems, saying he is far 
more interested in her than he could possibly 
o 209 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

be in her books, and that he ** nowadays re- 
ligiously abstains from reading poetry." Con- 
firmation of this latter statement occurs in our 
subsequent conversation. A friend of ours had 
met Swinburne, and had been assured by that 
erratic (please don't print it erotic) bard that 
he thinks Whitman, next to Hugo, the best of 
recent poets. When we tell our poet of this, 
and endeavor to ascertain if the admiration be 
reciprocal, we find him unfamiliar with Swin- 
burne's recent works. Reference to the latter's 
retraction of his first praise elicits the pertinent 
observation, " The trouble with Swinburne 
seems to be he don't know his own mind," 
but this is followed by warm encomiums upon 
*' Atalanta" and its gifted author. 

Whitman had seen Emerson for the last time 
when the philosopher's memory had failed and 
all his powers were weakening : instead of being 
shocked by this condition. Whitman thinks it 
fit and natural, " nature gradually reclaiming the 
elements she had lent, work all nobly done, soul 
and senses preparing for rest." Mentioning 
George Arnold, — 

*• Doubly dead because he died so young," — 

we find that Whitman loved and mourned him 
tenderly. He expresses an especial pleasure 



His Good Word for Everybody 

and pride in the successes of the poet Richard 
Watson Gilder, — " young Gilder," as he famil- 
iarly calls him. He loves Browning, and laments 
that " Browning never took to" him. He thinks 
our own country is fortunate in having felt the 
clean and healthful influences of four such natures 
as Emerson, Bryant, Whittier, and Longfellow. 

Indeed, he has a good word for everybody, 
and discerns laudable qualities in some whom 
the world has agreed to contemn and cast out. 
He has glowing expressions of affection for his 
devoted friends in all lands, and only words of 
excuse for his enemies. Of the pharisaic Har- 
lan, who dismissed him from a government 
clerkship solely because he had, ten years be- 
fore, published the poems of " Enfans d'Adam," 
he charitably says, " No doubt the man thought 
he was doing right." Concerning his harshest 
critics, including the author of the choice epithet 
** swan of the sewers," he speaks only in justi- 
fication : from their stand-point, their denuncia- 
tions of him and his book were deserved ; ** he 
never dreamt of blaming them for not seeing as 
he sees." 

After our return to his " shanty" we read to 
him a laudatory notice from the current number 
of one of our great magazines, in which one of 
his poems is mentioned with especial favor ; 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

whereupon he produces from his trunk a note 
written some years before from the same maga- 
zine, contemptuously refusing to publish that 
very poem. Evidences like this of a change in 
popular opinion are not needed to confirm Whit- 
man's faith in his own future, nor in that of the 
great humanity of which he is the prophet and 
exponent. 

Questioned concerning his habits and methods 
of literary work, he says he carries some sheets 
of paper loosely fastened together and pencils 
upon these ** the rough draft of his thought'* 
wherever the thought comes to him. Thus, 
** Leaves of Grass" was composed on the Brook- 
lyn ferry, on the top of stages amid the roar of 
Broadway, at the opera, in the fields, on the 
sea-shore. *' Drum Taps" was written amid 
war scenes, on battle-fields, in camps, at hospital 
bedsides, in actual contact with the subjects it 
portrays with such tenderness and power. The 
poems thus born of spontaneous impulse are 
finally given to the world in a crisp diction 
which is the result of much study and thought ; 
every word is well considered, — the work of 
revision being done "almost anywhere" and 
without the ordinary aids to literary composi- 
tion. In late years he wrote mostly upon the 
broad right arm of his chair. 



His Literary Work — Its Aims 

Complete equipment for his work was de- 
rived from contact with Nature in her abound- 
ing moods, from sympathetic intimacy with men 
and women in all phases of their lives, and from 
life-long study of the best boolcs ; these — Job, 
Isaiah, Homer, Dante, Shakespeare — have been 
his teachers, and possibly his models, although 
he has never consciously imitated any of them. 
His matter and manner are alike his own ; he 
has not borrowed Blake's style, as Stedman be- 
lieved, to recast Emerson's thoughts, as Clarence 
Cook alleged. His style would naturally re- 
semble that of the Semitic prophets and Gaelic 
bards, — " the large utterance of the early gods,'* 
— because inspired by familiarity with the same 
objects : the surging sea, the wind-swept moun- 
tain, the star-decked heaven, the forest pri- 
meval. 

His purpose, the moral elevation of humanity, 
he trusts is apparent in every page of his book. 
By his book he means " Leaves of Grass," the 
real work of his life, representing the truest 
thoughts and the highest imaginings of forty 
years, to which his other work has been inci- 
dental and tributary. After its eight periods of 
growth, " hitches," he calls them, he completes 
them with the annex, " Good-bye my Fancy," 
and thinks his record for the future is made up ; 
213 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

** hit or miss, he will bother himself no more 
about it." 

When questioned concerning the lines whose 
** naked naturalness" has been an offence to 
many, he impressively avers that he has pon- 
dered them earnestly in these latest days, and is 
sure he would not alter or recall them if he 
could. 

While not professing a moral regeneration or 
confessing the need of it, he yet assures us, 
** No array of words can describe how much I 
am at peace about God and about death." The 
author of ** Whispers of Heavenly Death" can- 
not be an irreverent person ; the impassioned 
** prayer" — 

" That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted 

With ray of light, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee. 

For that, O God, be it my latest word, here on my knees, 

Old, poor, and paralyzed, I thank Thee. . . . 

I will cling to Thee, O God, though the waves buffet me. 

Thee, Thee, at least, I know" — 

is not the utterance of an irreligious heart. 
One who has known Whitman long and well 
testifies that he was always a religious exalte, 
and his stanzas show that his musings on death 
and immortality are inspired by fullest faith. 
As we listen to him, calmly discoursing upon 
ai4 



His Religious Trust — Readings 

the great mysteries, — which to him are now 
mysteries no longer, — we wonder how many of 
those who call him " beast" or " atheist" can 
confront the vast unknown with his lofty trust, 
to say nothing of actual thanksgiving for death 
itself! 

" Praised be the fathomless universe 
For life and joy, for objects and knowledge curious, 
And for love, sweet love, — but praise ! praise ! praise ! 
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death." 

We who survive him will not forget his peace- 
ful yielding of himself to *' the sure-enwinding 
arms," nor the abounding trust breathed in his 
last message, sent back from the mystic frontier 
of the shadowy realm : " Tell them it makes no 
difference whether I live or die." 

In our chat he discloses a surprising knowl- 
edge of men and things, and a more surprising 
lack of knowledge of his own poetry. More 
than once it strangely appears that the visitor is 
more familiar with the lines under discussion 
than is their author. When this is commented 
upon he laughingly says, " Oh, yes, my friends 
often tell me there is a book called * Leaves of 
Grass' which I ought to read." So when we, 
about to take leave, ask him to recite one of his 
shorter poems, he assures us he does not remem- 
215 



A Day with the Good Gray Poet 

ber one of them, but will read anything we 
wish. We ask for the wonderful elegy, " Out 
of the Cradle endlessly Rocking," and afterward 
for the night hymn, " When Lilacs Last in the 
Dooryard Bloomed," and his compliance con- 
fers a never-to-be-forgotten pleasure. He reads 
slowly and without effort, his voice often tremu- 
lous with emotion, the lines gaining new gran- 
deur and pathos as they come from his lips. 

And this — alas that it must be ! — is our final 
recollection of one of the world's immortals : 
a hoar and reverend bard, — ** old, poor, and 
paralyzed," yet clinging to the optimistic creeds 
of his youth, — throned in his great chair among 
his books, with the waning light falling like a 
benediction upon his uplifted head, his face and 
eyes suffused with the exquisite tenderness of 
his theme, and all the air about him vibrating 
with the tones of his immortal chant to Death, 
— the " dark mother always gliding near with 
soft feet." 

Another hand-clasp, a prayerful " God keep 
you," and we have left him alone in the gather- 
ing twilight. 

We will not here discuss his literary merits. 
The encomiums of Emerson, Thoreau, Bur- 
roughs, Sanborn, Stedman, Ruskin, Tennyson, 
Rossetti, Buchanan, Sarrazin, etc., show what 
216 



His Future Fame 

he is to men of their intellectual stature ; but 
will he ever reach the great, struggling mass for 
whose uplifting he wrought ? His own brave 
faith is contagious, and we may discern in the 
wide-spread sorrow over his death, in the changed 
attitude of critics and reviewers, as well as in 
the largely increased demand for his books, evi- 
dences of his general acceptance. 

His day is coming, — is come. He died with 
its dawn shining full upon him. 



ai7 



INDEX 



Abbot, C. C, 104. 

Agassiz, 49, 104, 115. 

Alcott, Bronson, 21, 73, 78, 92, 144; Orchard House, 

54; Wayside, 58. 
Alcott, L. M., 21, 54, 102; Grave, 78; Homes, 21, 55. 
Aldrich, 91, in, 140; In Boston, 925 Ponkapog, 146. 
Amesbury, 124. 
Auburndale, 146. 
Austin, J. G., 102. 
Bartlett, G. B,, 25, 34, 41. 
Bartol, Dr., 48, 94. 
Beecher, H. W., 176, 185. 
Benson, Carl, 184. 
Berkshire, 155-198. 
Billings, Josh, 193. 
Boston, 83-102. 
Bridge, Horatio, 34, 182. 
Brook Farm, 147, 
Brown, John, 20, 23. 
Bryant, W. C, 174, 188, 189, 207. 
Burritt, Elihu, 176. 
Cambridge, 103. 
Carter, Robert, 109. 
Channing, W. E., 24, 41, 50, 72, 186} Homes, 22, 24, 

Clarke, J. F., 27, 76. 

Clough, Arthur, 49, 104, 118. 

Concord, 17-80; Battle-Field, 43; River, 39. 

Conway, Moncure, quoted, 29, 48. 

Cooke, Rose Terry, 193. 

219 



Index 

Corner Book-Store, Boston, 87. 

Curtis, G. W., 33, 48, 148, 149. 

Cushman, Charlotte, 114, 193. 

Dana, C. A., 149. 

Dana, R. H., 105. 

Danvers, Oak-Knoll, 138. 

Day with Walt Whitman, 201. 

Deerfield Arch, 173. 

Deland, Margaret, 93. 

Elmwood, no. 

Emerson, R. W., 26, 27, 28, 36, 41, 43, 69, 86, 144, 

175 J Grave, 775 Home, 45. 
Emerson, William, 26, 29, 35. 
Ethan Brand, 166. 
Fanny Fern's Grave, 115. 
Felton, Professor, 104. 
Field, H. M., 190. 
Fields, Annie, 89, 91. 
Fields, J. T., 65, 875 Home, 89. 
Fuller, Margaret, 48, 53, 86, 115, 149; Brattle House, 

105. 
Gail Hamilton, 66, 139. 
Garrison, W. L., 85, 102, 139. 
Gilder, R. W., 211. 
Gladden, Washington, 164. 
Grant, Robert, 89, 99. 
Gray, Asa, 105. 
Graylock, 158, 167, 174, 184. 
Guiney, L. I., 99, 102 j Home, 146. 
Hale, E. E., 94; Study and Abode, 100. 
Hale, Lucretia P., 99. 
Hamilton, Gail, 66, 139. 
Harris, Professor, 56. 

220 



Index 

Haverhill, 122. 

Hawthorne, 27, 41, 50, 53, 85, 88, 91 j Berkshire, 155- 

198 } Brook Farm, 149 ; Manse, 28-39 > Salem, 128- 

138; Sleepy Hollow, 75-77 J Wayside, 59-67. 
Headley, J. T., 187, 195. 
Higginson, T. W., 94, 99, 104. 
Hilliard, George, 34, 66, 91. 
Hoar, Elizabeth, 25. 
Hoar, Judge, 27. 
Holmes, 84} Boston Abodes, 91, 95; Cambridge, 103 j 

Grave, 114; Pittsfield, 192. 
House of the Seven Gables, 132, 193, 194. 
Howarth, Clementine, 209. 
Howe, fulia W., 98. 
Howells, 49, 66 J Homes, 97, 105, 117. 
Jamaica Plain, 145. 
Jewett, Sarah Orne, 91. 
Kemble, Fanny, 169, 186, 188, 193. 
Kossuth, Louis, 49, 187. 
Larcom, Lucy, 139. 
Lathrop, G. P., 59. 
Lathrop, Rose H., 195. 
Laurel Lake, 185. 
Lenox (Hawthorne), 176-198. 
Little Men, 21. 
Little Women, 21, 55, 78. 
Longfellow, 106, no, 139, 1925 Grave, 114; Home, 

107; Wayside Inn, 118. 
Lowell, J. R., 43, 118 J Elmwood, iioj Mount Auburn, 

"3- 

Marshfield, 142. 

Martineau, Harriet, 85, 106. 

Melville, Herman, 177, 185, 188} Arrow-Head, 190. 

221 



Index 

Monument Mountain, l68, 179, 187. 

Moulton, L. C, 93, 98. 

Mount Auburn, 113. 

Natural Bridge, 169. 

North Adams, 158-171. 

Norton, Professor, 104. 

Oak-Knoll, 138. 

Old Manse, 28-39. 

Orchard House, 53-56. 

Parker, Theodore, 49, 85. 

Parkman, Francis, 94, 113} Home, 145. 

Parsons, T. W., 118, 119, 120. 

Parton, James, 115; Study, 140. 

Peabody, Elizabeth, 29, 54, 145. 

Phelps- Ward, Mrs., 91, 125, 139. 

Phillips, Wendell, 49, 85. 

Pittsfield, 190-193. 

Plymouth, 144. 

Prescott, W. H., 86. 

Ripley, Ezra, 28, 33, 34. 

Ripley, Mrs. Samuel, 29, 35, 48. 

Salem, 128. 

Sanborn, F. B., 20-24. 

Scarlet Letter, 95, 135, 136. 

Sedgwick, Catherine, 176, 189, 190. 

Septimius Felton, 55, 60-65. 

Silas Lapham, 97, 99, 

Sleepy Hollow, 75-80. 

Sprague, Charles, 86. 

Stockbridge, 1895 Bowl, 176, 181 ; Glen, 

Stone, J. A,, 25. 

Sudbury, 118. 

Summer School of Philosophy, 55, 56. 



Index 

Sumner, Charles, 85, 92, 124. 

Swinburne, A. C, 210. 

Tanglewood, 183. 

Thaxter, Celia, 91, 139, 140. 

Thoreau, 19, 22, 27, 33, 41, 50, 63, 76, 169, 1745 

Abodes, 20, 24; Walden, 68-74. 
Ticknor, George, 94. 
Walden Pond, 68. 
Wayside, The, 58. 
Wayside Inn, The, 118. 
Webster, Daniel, 19; Marshfield, 142. 
Wheildon, William, 25. 
Whipple, E. P., 66, 76, 91. 
Whitefield, George, 140. 
Whitman, Walt, 50;" A Day with, 201, Leaves of 

Grass, 212, 213. .2 v K 

Whittier, 90, 93} Homes, 122, 124, 138; Scenes, 122, 

123, 124, 126 } Sepulchre, 127. 
Williamstown, 173. 
Willis, N. P., 84, 115. 
Woodworth ; Old Oaken Bucket, 141. 
Zenobia, 40, 150. 



THE END. 



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